[Andre Leroux]: Good evening, everybody. My name is Andre LaRue. I'm the chair of the Medford Community Development Board. Welcome to the June 9th, 2022 meeting. Pursuant to Chapter 20 of the Acts of 2021, this hearing of the Medford Community Development Board will be conducted via remote means. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so by accessing the meeting link contained herein. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, and public participation in any public hearing during this meeting shall be by remote means only. If you are participating remotely outside of the virtual platform, questions and comments may be submitted via email to OCD at Medford-MA.gov or via phone to 781-393-2480. That's OCD at Medford-MA.gov or via phone to 781-393-2480. Great, thank you, everybody. First item, I guess we should do a roll call. I always forget that. So I will call the members, board members' names and please just say present. Klaus Andreasen. Present. Vice Chair, Jackie Furtado.
[Jacqueline McPherson]: Present.
[Andre Leroux]: David Blumberg. Present. Christy Dowd.
[Jenny Graham]: Present.
[Andre Leroux]: Deanna Peabody?
[Jenny Graham]: Present.
[Andre Leroux]: Right, and as I mentioned in the chair, Andre LaRue, present. So thank you, everybody. First item on the agenda is the approval of minutes. And I think we have, Amanda, what are the minutes that we have? Is that correct, the date, the November ones? That's not correct.
[Amanda Centrella]: Yes, it actually, it is correct. So this was the first and I think one of the longer zoning for codification hearings. So for this, we have these available and actually next time we meet, there'll be some more minutes from back then. And Yvette, who's not on tonight, diligently put those together. So we welcome any comments or questions on them.
[Andre Leroux]: Thank you. Yes, I know we were running behind. I wasn't sure if that was that far behind, but.
[Amanda Centrella]: Yes.
[Andre Leroux]: Any questions and comments or edits about the minutes of November 18th, 2021?
[SPEAKER_06]: This is Christy. I wasn't present at that meeting, so I can't comment.
[Andre Leroux]: Hearing none, is there a motion to approve the minutes?
[Jacqueline McPherson]: Audrey, this is Jackie vice chair. Um, I put out a motion to approve the minutes from the November meeting.
[Andre Leroux]: Thank you. Is there a second?
[Deanna Peabody]: This is Deanna. Oh, second.
[Andre Leroux]: Yeah. All right. Uh, roll call vote is in order. Cless and Dresden. Hi, vice chair. Jackie Furtado. Hi, David Bloomberg. Hi. Kristi Dowd abstained and Deanna Peabody. I am in favor as well. Thank you. Moving on to the next item on the agenda, which is our principal item of the evening. Continued from the May 16, 2022 meeting, site plan review recommendations to the Zoning Board of Appeals for 4054 Mystic Valley Parkway, the Rise Together project. So I believe we have, there was a robust conversation at the last meeting and we raised a number of questions and comments and I believe the project proponents are going to to address some of those with a presentation this evening. So is that you, Quinlan? I see you nodding your head.
[Zac Bears]: That is me, yes. And I think I have a decent amount of staff on here as well with me.
[Andre Leroux]: Great, thank you. And I think Amanda is going to post the presentation in the chat for members of the public.
[Amanda Centrella]: Yes, that might take me a minute, but I will put it in there. You guys should feel free to start in.
[Zac Bears]: Over to you, Clement, feel free to get going. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, and good evening, everyone, members of the board and those in attendance tonight. We're excited to be back in front of the board this evening to discuss our new life science project at 4054 Mystic Valley Parkway in Medford. We spent the last few weeks working through some of the board comments from the previous meeting, and we have a lot to cover tonight. So I think it'd be best to just get right into it. I'm not sure. I think we have Q3 who's going to run the slide deck. Hi.
[John Intoppa]: Steve Presidione here from Q3. I'll be running the PowerPoint. I'm actually getting a Zoom message that the host has disabled participant screen sharing. I may just need to be promoted or given permission.
[Amanda Centrella]: Can do. Let me. All right. You should be set.
[John Intoppa]: Perfect. Thank you. Is that showing up?
[Amanda Centrella]: Yes.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Perfect. Um, Steve, if you want to just go to the next slide. Thank you. So, uh, yeah, just a quick recap of the project team and who you might be hearing from tonight. Um, so on the development side represented by myself, we have rise together in partnership with the Matarazzo family from Medford. We have the project architect and architectural consultants, Q3 and Jacobs, who are on the call tonight. Our civil permitting and transportation experts, BHB, who you'll be hearing from tonight. MDLA for our landscape architect, also on the call tonight. And then Feldman with surveying and Haley and Aldrich for our geotechnical engineer. Next slide, please. So just to reorient the group to the site, it's 4054 Mystic Valley Parkway located just across from the Tobert McDonald Park between Wellington Circle and Commercial Street, along Route 16. To the east at the bottom right of the page, you'll see Wellington Orange Line Station, and just off to the west of the page is Interstate 93. Next slide, please. So it's been just under a month since we last met with the board, and we've had a few meetings since then to really home in on answering some of the questions and comments that we heard from the board. We met with MassDOT and Medford Transportation Engineering to discuss transportation mitigation and coordination of future improvements. We met with the Economic Development Department and CD board staff to review some of the materials that were discussed that we've been working on. We had a meeting with Medford Vocational Technical High School with Principal Fallon to discuss future partnerships with the school, which I'll touch on in just the next slide here. And this past Monday, we met with the Medford Chamber of Commerce to discuss the project. All of those meetings allowed us to continue progressing the goals of the project and of rise in the city of Medford. Next slide, please. And just to touch on one of those meetings, and one of them that we've been working with for a while now. RISE has been meeting with Medford High School. We've been working on how RISE can utilize its resources and connections in the development and construction industry today to support the school and its vision. This fall, RISE will be partnering with MVTHS to bring opportunities to their students that include guest lectures from experienced RISE staff, site tours of real construction projects on site, promotion of the programs and work that MVTHS does for students and offering paid co-op programs to students who qualify. And for those who don't know, Medford Vocational High School actually runs cooperative programs where kids and seniors who are in school actually do one week of class and get to go work on job sites bi-weekly as well. So we're gonna be offering two of those programs and are looking forward to having Medford High School students on our job sites. In addition, RISE is looking into permanent future partnerships with the project itself. These include job force training and offsite learning opportunities within the community flex space of the ground floor that you'll hear about a little bit more this evening. We're also committed to setting up tenant lease requirements that focus on managing and maintaining the space, dedicated programming of the space and promotion of the space through publicly accessible channels and Medford schools and community groups. Next slide. And before I turn it back over to the design team, I wanted to recap some of the questions and comments we heard back on May 16th. So on the design and architecture, we heard comments relating to ground floor activation and integration with the open space, facade design related to massing, glass transparency and materiality, an interest in learning more about the project's resiliency and sustainability initiatives. For programming, there was an interest in seeing more details on what's happening in the ground floor retail and community spaces. And we also had questions on what employee amenities and what loading and safety around the site look like. And for transportation, we talked about strategies to reduce vehicle trips through tenant and employee incentives and services to public transit. We also wanted to know more about how we could improve pedestrian and bike circulation on Mystic Valley Parkway. as well as improve safety around the site. The project team's excited to be back here this evening to discuss all of the work that we've done over the past month, and I'll turn it over to the project architects to talk through some of the design changes we made since the last month to start us off.
[MCM00000596_SPEAKER_15]: Thank you. Thanks, Quinn. My name is Brian Cook, Principal of Architecture at Jacobs. We thought it would be a good idea to go through some of our lab metrics. Maybe some of you are familiar with speculative lab buildings, but we thought it would be a good primer to hit on why we do some of the things that we do. So lab buildings on the left, office buildings on the right. Really what this gets down to is we've always heard that thinner buildings are better because it allows more light into the space. Well, that's true for office buildings where you have cubicles that may stretch from the window to the core. But in a lab building, there's a quite a bit of support space that goes along with it. space that doesn't fit within the building core, space that doesn't need light and oftentimes doesn't want light. So what we see in lab buildings is they usually have a deeper, what we call lease span from the core to the window wall. And typically a good office or a good lab building starts at kind of that Goldilocks zone right in the middle of about 120 feet. What we've noticed over the past six months to a year, as there's been more of a push towards carbon reduction and more efficient buildings, all electric buildings. In order to achieve those goals, a lot more equipment, to be quite honestly frank with you, needs to go into the penthouse. And what we've noticed is at about 127 foot mark in the width of the building, we really struggle to fit a lot of that mechanical equipment up in the penthouse in order to overcome the larger electrical needs or process loads of a lab office building. So we'll get to why that's important in a little bit, but that 120 to 130 foot range is kind of the sweet spot. We can go larger, we have gone larger, but those become unique buildings and more purpose-built. Next slide, please. The other thing that's important about the grid is the cadence of the grid or the spacing of the structural grid. And those are usually in 11 foot modules, anywhere from 22 feet to 33 feet. A little bit different than an office building, but really this is predicated on lab equipment. It comes in a certain size, it's really not modifiable. And it comes down to a 30 inch lab bench, a five foot walking space and a 30 inch lab bench. And then you multiply that by two, you get 11 feet. The reason that this is important is when you're looking at typical office buildings compared to a lab office building, there may be a proportional difference that some of you might see, and it makes the building maybe look a little squatter because of this grid. Go to the next slide, please. The other difference is the floor-to-floor height. We can design great office buildings in 13 feet, sometimes even 12 foot 6, but with the amount of air and other equipment that we have in lab buildings in the interstitial space, 15 feet is really the gold standard. What we're trying to do here is not only working with RISE, but also the real big foray into lab and Medford is really starting out on the right foot. And that's getting to a 15 foot floor to floor. Next slide, please. The other big difference is a penthouse. we do a lot to disguise this and you'll see the team has come up with some good ways of disguising the penthouse and what we're going to show you. But this really ties also ties back to the width of the building. As that building gets narrower, there's a set amount of equipment that needs to go up in this roof. And it's kind of like one of those toys if you have kids where you squish it in one direction and it grows in the other. So the narrower a building gets, the taller this gets. So we'd like to keep it around 40, 45 feet, but we have some buildings on the narrower side. This is close to 53. There are a lot of things that we can do to hide it, and you'll see some of the things that the team is proposing. Next slide, please.
[John Intoppa]: Thanks, Brian. My name is Steve Prestijohn, Cube 3, the other architect on the project. I think I'm going to walk you through some of the plan developments from last round. We heard a lot of comments looking for a little more as far as programming, especially on the ground floor level. So we've prepared some slides that will go over that information. But I think we wanted to start by just kind of reminding everybody of the overall site and the kind of access and other building services and how they operate around the perimeter. As you might remember, we were providing a perimeter ring road around the building at the ground level. And this is a one-way drive aisle. This runs in a sort of counterclockwise direction around the building. So off of Mystic Deli Parkway, counterclockwise to page right here, and then back around. The curb cuts and other turning radii are suitable for emergency vehicles as well as the expected truck sizes, chassis sizes for loading. So any deliveries for lab equipment or other tenant needs and as well as trash pickup are done in that central loading area. If you can see my cursor where the purple line is. So trucks would come in back into the loading dock, do their delivery or pick up trash and then be able to leave out around the perimeter. Additional to that, um, bike traffic coming from the Wellington circle side going, uh, page, page North here would be able to turn in, um, walk their bike onto the sidewalk and then walk into a bike facility room that faces a page South here. Uh, similarly pedestrians are able to cross. Uh, we have, we have a couple of entries that'll go into a little more on the ground floor plan, and we have a sort of public plaza space that shapes that experience and in that public realm facing the street. As I mentioned, um, we, we heard a lot of desire to see a little more on the ground floor plan. So I think we, we spent a lot of time as a team, both, both cube three and Jacobs kind of understanding and wrapping our heads around the spaces and how they may lay out. Um, you may remember from the previous diagram, we were envisioning a lot of community space on the Northern side of this plan. So you can see, um, in this plan here, there's a, there's a sort of coffee, coffee lounge space, meeting rooms, as well as classrooms for students, um, teaching labs. that dovetail into some of the items that Quinn went over earlier. In the back of the building, sort of near the parking ramp down, you can see a lot of the necessary support spaces and other building service spaces. And then on the bottom left of the plan, at the point that's sort of jutting out towards Mystic Valley Parkway, you can see a cafe space. So the idea here is that the frontage of the building is really in the plaza are acting together in tandem as a sort of meaningful public frontage. This cafe is really coming out and engaging the street. We're providing sort of seating around that. We're providing an entry point off of the front of the building and another entry point into the main lobby that sort of comes through this pathway where we have additional seating, planters, a small knee wall. So sort of shaping the landscape and creating an articulated public plaza. And that lobby as people enter the building is sort of contiguous with that cafe or anyone using the community spaces could access them. from there as well. This is going up to the level above. So this is what a typical lab floor will look like as far as the perimeter and the shape and size of the floor plate. And the items Brian mentioned, the structural grid size, the sort of overall dimension of the floor plate, those necessary lab metrics are really driving the sort of size and shape that we're working with here. So that's sort of our baseline that we're now working with to try to create engaging architecture and shape the form of the building. And just to briefly go over this, we have a sort of centralized core and we have a lab floor plate that could support a variety and variety of quantity of tenants, whether it's one tenant or several tenants per floor. And we're highlighting the setbacks here, the front side and rear setbacks in a red dashed line The purpose of that one one change we made from last round was we wanted to create a better buffer from the the side yards, to be as sensitive as we can in the rear as well to be as sensitive as we can to the future visioning of the area as I'll go over in a in a forthcoming slide. From last round, this is really just a zoning table showing the variances we're seeking as a project team. As of May 16th, we were looking for a variance on the side and rear because of the bottom right corner of the building encroaching on those setbacks. Due to some reshaping of the plan, we've been able to stay out of those setbacks and provide a stronger buffer, and we'll no longer be requesting those variances in our application. This is really just a quick diagram to as we transition to start to talk about the landscaping of the project. But before I hand things off, I just wanted to briefly mentioned that our goal as a team is to be sensitive to this entire quarter. We know that the city has a has a lot to look forward to with planning envisioning the sort of public character of the entire Mystic Valley Parkway area. So we wanted to develop this in a way where we could commit to being flexible and finding a way in the future to adapt to whatever may happen on the adjacent parcels, whatever may happen in the wooded area behind the site. So I think we've taken a couple of measures as far as our landscape design to be as flexible as we can without being too prescriptive for what may come in the future. So at this point, I'm gonna hand things off to Mike, who is gonna go over some of the landscape features on the project, thank you.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: Thanks, Steve. Hi, everyone. My name is Mike Rattenmayer. I'm a landscape architect at MDLA. I'm going to run through a few landscape slides here. First up is the overall site plan. We've developed a color version just to better show the green space that this project is proposing. Again, just to reorient you, Mystic Valley is on the left side of our image here. The goal of the project is to sort of rebuild the parkway presence by renovating the lawn shoulder, new sidewalk. With our focus on creating a welcoming public plaza, we've provided a generous landscape buffer that creates just a safe buffer between the plaza and the parkway. as well as we really focused on trying to work with the lobby and cafe spaces as it's intended to have pedestrians spill out into each of these zones. Moving towards the back of the site, as Steve mentioned, we do have the ring road, and then we're providing green spaces towards the north of the site. Again, focusing on flexibility and future connections that may need to be made to future projects in this area. A couple of things that have changed since we last spoke. There is that perimeter wall and fencing that we were discussing at our last meeting. The wall still remains around the perimeter of the site, but we've removed the solid six foot high fence, and we're providing a more transparent vehicle, excuse me, vehicular and pedestrian, rated rail so it's 42 inches high because of the heights of the walls vary and do require that height of guardrail, but it is more transparent. We've also with the wider one lane road for fire access, We've provided some decorative paving just to break up the larger zones of asphalt that serve an aesthetic purpose, as well as for pedestrian access, if needed, towards the back of the site, and again, for potential future connections. Next slide, please, Steve. This is an enlargement of the entry plaza, just to show what we're trying to do from a public, inviting the public in as much as possible to the retail and cafe, We are maintaining the three existing parkway trees that you can see sort of that are more transparent towards the bottom of the page, as well as adding a new parkway tree to continue the rhythm. The existing lighting stays at the street level. And we're providing, again, shade trees, flexible seating, decorative paving. There's 10 bike stations shown in this plaza. And the goal is to really just engage the community and passersby along the parkway. Also on the bottom left of the plaza, we are showing a rain garden area that'll collect some of the stormwater from this plaza as well. Next slide, please, Steve. And there were some comments on the site lighting last time. So we thought we'd create this diagram just to kind of better better highlight where the light sources are exterior to the building, as well as some photos on the right of our decorative light pole that will be located in the plaza. So our light poles and then the bollards are also located in the pedestrian zones that you can see in the left side of the screen. Those are the same family. And then along the perimeter drive, there'll be wall-mounted lights, and all these lights are downward directed to limit light pollution, as well as create safe light levels for pedestrian wayfinding and vehicular wayfinding throughout the site. With that, happy to answer questions later on. Great.
[MCM00000596_SPEAKER_15]: This is Brian Cook again with Jacobs. Big topic, carbon, carbon reduction. So with all of our projects, we go through two, we look at this through two lenses. There's operational carbon and there's embodied carbon. Embodied carbon is what it takes to make the building, the materials in the building, get it to the site and everything about putting the building together. And then there's the operational carbon of how healthy is the building long-term and how is it operating? Next slide, please. So the first thing that we all talk about is operational carbon. thing out there is, you know, no fossil fuel burning, fossil fuel reduction, which is obviously incredibly important, but we need to do it in a very measured way. So what we do, if you can see this graph, blue operational carbon and orange is embodied carbon. A year ago, we were all designing buildings in the left column. We had mixed fuel, both electrical and burning natural gas in order to achieve the mechanical systems and tempering of space. Today we are a little bit beyond the next line, which is starting to design energy efficient mixed fuel systems. The world, the neighboring municipalities, Boston, the greater Boston area is really starting to look at, well, what if we do all electric buildings? All electric buildings work well in offices or residential There's a reason labs haven't gone that way yet. There's a huge process load in labs. And in order to go all electric, one, the grid needs to be able to handle it. Okay. Let's just assume that it can, uh, in order to get all the way down to, uh, Taking all extracting all the heat from the cold in the winter here in, in New England, without using any fossil fuels for, for added heat. The technology isn't quite there yet. We can get 90, 95% of the way there with what we have today, but not quite there. And this ties back to the width of the building. In order to get to 85, 90% fossil fuel reduction in the current lab buildings, it is an immense amount of mechanical equipment, even more than a typical lab building. So that's one of the reasons why we push to get to 127 foot minimum to fit all the air source heat pumps that need to go up in there. Now, once all in our designs, we do show a path to an all electric building and how that could be done and make sure there's space there for it for the day two condition when it does make the jump. And that's really how you get to the last graph column here is once the grid is all clean power, and once it has enough power to be able to support all of these buildings on all electrical loads, we prepare these buildings that we designed today to be able to support that requirement. Next slide. Then we look at embodied carbon. This is a little bit easier to handle now. We look at the biggest creator of embodied carbon, which is the structure. And we start to look at American sources of steel or Canadian sources of steel, where they use electric arc furnaces, again, all back to using electric and not burning coal or fossil fuels to be able to smelt the metal. And then we get into some of the the lower percentages of interiors or the enclosure of the building. And companies are constantly trying to change how they do things. But we're, as a group, our design team and Jacobs Corporately, we're constantly looking at the market and trying to get and strive to have the lowest embodied carbon within our systems. So this is something ingrained in our design approach. Next slide, please. Then there's LEED. LEED's been around a long time. what talking with a proponent and what the applicant is looking to do is to be LEED Gold certified with a pursuit for platinum. So we will look for it. Platinum lab buildings are incredibly difficult, but there are things that we can do to move closer towards that goal. So that in during the study process, we will be looking at a number of different things and seeing what is the path to platinum and is it possible. You can see a whole number of things here. A number of it, I'm not going to read through everything, is what a number of buildings do. It should be doing. But one of the things I want to point out at the bottom, and it goes into the next slide too, is the implementation of photovoltaics. You know, between this, and you go to the next slide, with the Heat Island. Next slide, Steve. Oh, sorry. I jumped one. Let me take a step back. Blood resilience. I was really going to tie that together. That was going to work really well. Flood resilience. So we all know that resiliency of the important systems in a building are paramount to making sure that after a flood event, we can get back up and running and keep business flowing. So with looking at the incoming flood levels and the sensitive equipment, one of the things that we're already doing in our design is taking the transform room and looking at putting it on the second floor to make sure that the sensitive electrical equipment is above any flood that would come in. The other thing we're doing is looking at sensitive parts of the building. And the best thing that we can do is to ensure that when people go home at night and lock up the building, that it's passively protected. So that's looking at the garage entries, loading dock entries, any low level louvers, doors, storefronts, and making sure that those in their closed and secure position are ready to prevent against storm or sea level rise or flood event from the river. Next slide, please. So here's where I was going to tie the other one together, the heat island. In order to do this, one of the things that we look at in our building, obviously there's a lot of stuff that goes up in the penthouse and exhaust stacks that come through the roof. We really try to minimize and organize those types of things to be as least obtrusive as possible. But on the remainder of the roof, you know, putting up appropriate solar panels and filling in the rest of the area, with sedum roofs to reduce the heat island and to aid in slowing percolation rates or storm runoff rates is something that is also very important to the team. Next slide, please.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_09]: All right. This is Brian O'Connor with Q3. I'm going to quickly walk you guys through a series of views here. We heard comments in the last round that fell into two primary categories. One was, what is the mass and scale of this building look like from the context, from further away? Where am I going to see it? How tall is it going to be? What's it going to look like? And then the other category was, you know, the building we saw last time, the renderings were really designed more around the landscape and the sense of place. And the building had you know, not a lot of definition to it. So we're going to walk you through a little bit more about how this building is actually going to look and intersect with the visuals along Mystic Valley Parkway. So we're going to start with this. This is a quick context shot that's really taken from roughly the area of the future Wellington underpass. If you look in the upper right hand corner of the screen, there's sort of a red cone that identifies the field of vision. We're looking across the park here, back towards the building, towards Mystic Valley Parkway. And you'll notice that in this winter condition view, we tried to do winter condition wherever we can, you will see the building sort of sticking up beyond the tree, the tree line over on Mystic Valley. You'll also notice that we're on left-hand side and what we're trying to do is get this sort of most extreme possible condition here. The views from the other side of the road start to get a lot more of the winter tree condition in front and this is kind of the most clear view you'll have of the building from this location. So we are looking at about four floors of the building plus half of the total penthouse enclosure in this view. This is a view, again, I'll direct you to the upper right-hand corner of the key plan. So we're in Wellington Circle at this point. We're looking down 16 on the cross intersection with 28 here. So we're looking down Mystic Valley Parkway, which is gonna gently curve to the left in front of us. And you'll see the building sort of behind the signs here. One thing that I'll point out here that you'll see in all of these views that was alluded to earlier, we do have a, a very tall penthouse on the building. And there were sort of some comments last time about the weight and the scale of it. And we've done two things. We've tried to start breaking it down a little bit by bringing more of a sawtooth into that volume itself. We've also lightened the color and we've actually taken the envelope of the building at the top floor and sort of pulled that up a floor with a false parapet that mimics the building skin below in an effect to really sort of hide about 50 percent, 40 to 50 percent of the exposure of the penthouse itself. Next slide. So now we're really up close to the building and you can see these renderings are a little bit more developed. So the closer in shots will look more like this for the most part. What we wanted to do here is really focus on a few things. The last images that you guys had seen as a group were very dark They were very heavy. The windows were showing almost 100% reflectivity. This is much closer to what we're trying to achieve here. The building skin is sort of a light gray metal with darker mullions. The glass will have a very high level of transparency. And as the building gets more towards the wetlands on the backside, you can see that it starts to transition from a very sort of glassy front edge against Mystic Valley Parkway to a more solid, less transparent building on the backside of the site where we have strip windows that you can see. We're looking across Mystic Valley Parkway here. And again, the key plan in the upper right sort of indicates where we're looking. The focus at the ground level here is really on that cafe on the front corner, the piece of the building that Steve described as sort of coming out to engage the street. And then as you look along the edge of the building, you'll see parallel parked cars on the side there. as well as the entry to the bike room. And then further down in the building, starting to disappear behind the landscaping, we have the entrance to the loading dock. You can see in this view, sorry, before you change it, Steve, one of the things that I think is important to note, that extra floor of building envelope that we're pulling up will be screened and sort of built to look like the rest of the building. But you can see that as you get closer to the building, the visual impact of that penthouse really does seem to diminish. And in many viewpoints when you're close to the building disappear, because not only did we sort of pull the building up around it, but the penthouse itself is also set back from the edge of the building. And again, you can see a little bit of that sawtooth at the upper level. In the next image, we're looking in the other direction. So this is sort of a counter view. And again, you'll notice in the upper right-hand corner, we're sort of looking in the opposite direction, Also from the park side, and you can really see sort of the glassiness of that front corner and the right side of the building transitioning to a little bit more solidity as it moves back into the site. In this view, you can see a little bit more of the articulation on the penthouse up above, which is metal panel clad. And again, this sort of, you know, very, very glassy connected ground floor condition that engages the plaza at the lower level. This is a view that's much closer, and you can see the communication building that's existing in the foreground on the right-hand side. So this is sort of what we think it would feel like if you were in a car driving down Mystic Valley Parkway. You can see we've very deliberately kind of blurred out the existing trees that exist along the edge there to make sure that you can see the building through it. Here, when you get a little closer to the building, you can see it's very distinctly not a flat building. The floors are sort of pronounced with these extruded edges. There's some texture and rhythm to the metal panel. The large glass sort of goes virtually floor to ceiling with a little bit of a ceiling line up top, and then very transparent ground floor with really great visible access. You can start to see the edge of the bike room sort of peeking around the corner behind the communications building there in the foreground. This is a view looking directly down that path that Steve and the landscape team had talked about a little bit. This is the main access drive for cars that'll park under the building for loading, for service, and leaves the opportunity on the extreme right side of the image or our property there for the potential connection to really make sure that we're being sensitive to future development in the area. You can see the beginning of the plaza on the left-hand side down low, the seat wall. sort of on the backside of the existing sidewalk, really allowing strong view lines from everywhere into the building while creating a little bit of a more pedestrian-friendly environment behind that edge, outdoor seating, benches, and the sidewalk kind of being rebuilt along the front edge. This is a view looking in the other direction. So now we're close, we're sort of in that breakdown lane area along the edge of Mystic Valley Parkway. You can see the outdoor seating is really protected in many respects by living behind the corner from traffic in the projecting area. And this is the sort of quick shot of that activated plaza. You can see there's a very significant amount of buffering in green space along the edge, as had been mentioned earlier, replanting of an additional street tree along the frontage. the main building lobby is on the extreme left-hand edge of this image across the plaza. And again, you can see a little bit more detail on the articulation and sort of layering in depth to the building itself. And these are really distinctly not flat sided buildings. And again, one of the primary goals here is to make sure that this building reads as a very transparent building. We think it's really gonna be a nice counterpoint to what exists along Mystic Valley Parkway. This is an image that's a little bit further away. So now we're backing up. We're sort of going westbound on Mystic Valley. This is the intersection of Commercial and Mystic Valley Parkway. Here you can see the sort of scale of the building against the foreground building on Commercial. You could start to see the full extent of the penthouse here. And again, the building is, you know, very glassy up at the front edge and then sort of transitions as it goes back. There is a bump out on the back of the building that creates a little bit more layer and texture back there. And you can see, again, the strategy here is fairly clear to make sure that there are defined floor lines. We have shadow lines that are being created. And as the building scales up, you might notice on the leading edge of the building, there's a difference between the top four floors and the four floors below that, where there are more pronounced floor lines down low, and that transitions across and up into the building. This is a quick sketch of view rather than a full-on rendering. These get harder to do as we get further away, showing the detail on the building. We wanted to show a view corridor from Commercial Street. Mystic Valley Parkway would be further down the street to the right. Again, the scale of this building is large compared to the immediate surroundings, but we wanted to show this view so you could see the full extent of the penthouse and the scale of the building from this viewpoint. Again, we're fairly close to the building still here. And then this is a view from the back lot behind the stop and shop. So you're sort of looking, you know, across the entire wetland area here at the backside of the building. On the left-hand side, you can sort of see that sawtooth shape of the building itself, like marching out towards Mystic Valley Parkway. The backside of the building is treated in a very similar way to the rear sides. We're very deliberately not creating the backside of a building at all here. We want this to sort of feel universally transparent, glassy, and sort of fully articulated all the way around. And then I think this is the last shot. This is sort of just a quick aerial shot to give you a little more sense of how the building itself sits within its immediate context. The communication building to the right, you can see the ring road that Steve described on the right-hand side. parallel parking along the road there, access to the bike room, access to the loading dock, the road kind of tucking around the back corner and then the very active front plaza area to the forefront of the building and then on the left-hand side. I think just very quickly, we wanted to touch on the materials. I think the last images that you guys saw had a very, very sort of dark building. I think what we're anticipating here is a much lighter, very glassy, very transparent building with a smooth metal panel at the upper levels. The bulk of the building, the vast majority of the building is going to be three different tones of gray corrugated metal panel, which you'll see on the right working closely with the storefront and the glazing. There are white metal panel bands that live in between the windows that you see highlighted up at the top. And then our windows are going to be fairly high performance, high performance windows. So it's a, it's a very sort of a neutral techie, but not dark and heavy material palette here, which we think will really set a nice tone along Mystic Valley. I think we're going to talk a little bit about traffic and parking.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: Awesome. Thanks, Brian. Hello, members of the board. My name is Ryan White. I'm a senior transportation engineer with VHB and I led the traffic and transportation analysis for this project. Let's start with a quick summary of the study that we conducted. There's approximately 240 net new project-generated trips during the peak hour, say between 8 and 9 a.m. in the morning, and 112 net new trips during the evening peak hour. Again, there's a 422-space parking garage provided on-site underground here. The difference between the a.m. and p.m. peaks is really the existing site credit. As most of you know, the existing site is a restaurant, and it's open during the evening, generating existing trips to and from. We really took a conservative approach to this analysis. We assumed that everyone would drive 100% mode share to, again, take the most conservative approach. And the analysis showed that there was limited impacts on the roadways due to this increase in volume. And there was no change in the overall level of service of any of the study area intersections as shown on the blue dots on the figure here. However, we feel confident that some of the improvements that I'll outline in the upcoming slides will make tenants choose to use transit walking and biking to access the sites as we really explore some of the new connections that I'll talk about. Again, as Quinn mentioned at the beginning of this meeting, since our last presentation, we've had meetings with both Todd and his staff at the city, as well as MassDOT to really further define this mitigation. Next slide, please. So let's talk about these improvements in three main buckets. First, let's focus on the pet and bike realm and the enhancements associated with that. In the last meeting, we heard that showers and lockers were important for biker commuters, so we added that into the secure bike room area. This project is also committed to working with DOT to study and, if feasible, design and construct the mid-block crossing. High-level initial concept is shown on the right here. In our meeting with DOT, they were generally receptive towards this improvement, but there is a more in-depth study that will need to be done to validate this concept design. Additionally, we're looking at installing pedestrian countdown timers and signal heads at two area intersections to improve accessibility in the area, and lastly, to improve general bike conditions in the area. The proponent will work with the city to sponsor a blue bike station on or near the site. And again, we'll work with DOT about the possible bike facility along Mystic Valley Parkway with the goal of connecting off to the east to the train station. Now, if we go on to the next slide, let's focus on transportation demand management. The proponent is exploring joining the lower Mystic Valley TMA. This organization has a bunch of property owners and businesses in the area And it will be able to provide a lot of the baseline TDM programs that will encourage tenants to walk, bike or take transit, including a potential shuttle service from the site to the Wellington station. Proponents also interested in getting the car share service on sites such as Zipcar. to help or within the garage to help with some of those short work trips if someone takes transit and has an offsite meeting, they need a car to take for a couple of hours, which will enable that easily. And lastly, tenants will be encouraged to offer pre-tax subsidies for employees to buy MBTA monthly passes or some of the new flex passes that the MBTA is now offering. Lastly, for improvements on the vehicle realm, if you go to the next slide, please. Um, on the roadway, uh, we're looking at updating vehicle detection, um, at two area intersections, uh, recommended by Todd Blake, uh, the city traffic engineer, um, installing wayfinding signage to direct drivers to the correct locations to make some of the illegal or make some of the legal U-turn movements, not the illegal ones, um, and directing them to the proper locations, um, just due to the median divided nature of Mystic Valley Parkway. as well as closing one unused curb cut that is currently provided on the site. There's also EV parking within the garage. I believe the project is targeting about 10% EV ready upon building opening. If we go to the next and my final slide, just gives you a very visual summary of some of the proposed improvements I just mentioned and walk through. As you can see, they're really spread out throughout the general study area that I showed on my first slide. And with that, let me hand it back over to Quinn to wrap up the presentation.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate the time tonight again, and happy to have the team here answering any questions that you may have. There was a lot of work done over the last month and a lot of materials put together, and we're really excited about proposing these new changes and materials to the team here. So happy to answer any questions that you might have.
[Andre Leroux]: Great, thank you for your presentation. I'm going to stop sharing for a moment here. Let's open it up to members of the board for questions and comments.
[Claes Andreasen]: You want me to go first? Go ahead, class. I knew I could count on you. I just want to say thank you to everybody on the call. including the people that I know pretty well. I think, you know, I don't have a lot of comments. I think it's looking great. I think you took the comments we had last time and came back with, you know, nice, a nice set of a nice looking building. And, you know, you took our comments and really sort of integrated them. So I really, I don't have a lot to say. I just want to say thank you. I didn't see anything specifically that caught my eye. I'm interested in, as we go forward, seeing the material choices specifically. I think just getting that mix of the metal panels is is going to be important so that the building looks right and contextual. But being in the same business, when I get granular details like that, that's a good sign because it means the big issues are past us. So thanks to everyone.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Clayston. We'll absolutely keep you in the loop on that as we keep moving forward as well. Thank you so much. Appreciate that.
[Andre Leroux]: Other board members.
[Jenny Graham]: This is Christy doubt I just like to say I have the same sentiments as place I think it was really intentional and thoughtful and addressing our comments from the last meeting so I really appreciate. you know, the team taking that approach. And I'm really excited about the opportunities with the vocational school. And I guess around that, I would just have one question just for clarification. I guess I don't really understand how it would work, but if, how does the agreements work to ensure that those commitments are made with the lab occupiers? Is it with them? to provide the job training opportunities or is it through rise?
[Zac Bears]: No, it's a, it's a, it's a great question, Christy. Thank you so much. Um, yeah, so typically, you know, obviously the building will be designed to incorporate those, those items on the ground floor. That's, that's the intent and we'll be, you know, on this design as well. Uh, the agreements would more than likely, uh, for the building itself be with the owner of the building. So whoever would own the building and and make all the leases would have to be the one that's responsible for that community space. The real tenant requirements that we're considering because we don't have as much experience with lab training or any of that nature would be with the tenants of the building and would want tenants to come into the building and want to be a part of the community in Medford and want to do this type of programming with the students in the city of Medford. So that's really what we're going to be targeting when we start talking to future tenants off the building and would want them to be a part of that. And that, that will be an agreement that the owner makes with the future tenants.
[MCM00001456_SPEAKER_03]: Got it. Thank you.
[Andre Leroux]: Thank you, Chris. You appreciate it. On that note, a question about the community partnerships. It said that you were exploring those in addition to the job training. Uh, can you speak about any, uh, you know, any potential community partnerships?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, uh, I know we talked a little bit about Medford high school. Um, we're hoping that that turns into something even bigger down the road, um, maybe a partnership with more, more of the schools in the area. We really don't want to just focus on Medford High School, but we do have the resources now today to start implementing those programs in the fall. So we really wanted to start the focus there and continue moving forward with that. One of the other groups that we've talked to a few times now has been Mystic River Watershed Association. I'm not sure anyone's on the call from their group, but Amber Christopherson and Patrick Heron over there have been great to work with. Uh, they've sat down with us a few times. We've talked about potentially using that same ground floor space as well. Uh, and if they can do any programming in that space, we're not just focused on, you know, having that space format for high school, but one of the other things that we've talked to them about is this potential crossing and the connection, not only for. Uh, the, uh, future developments to come over to the park area. If there are future developments over here. but also connecting the park area back to whatever those future developments are or whatever happens in this area. So that was something important to them. That park is really their home almost. And we want to make sure that we're doing our part to ensure that that park and the connections that are to and from that park happen.
[Andre Leroux]: All right, thank you. But that space, just to be clear, you're thinking about it as flexible space that could be used by multiple community organizations, not necessarily looking at providing permanent office space to an organization.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, no, not at the moment. No permanent office space down there at the moment. We've been considering that essentially with what we're calling a zero rent space. So it is publicly available. Uh, typically what we've done on other projects that we've worked on and owned is, uh, we've set up agreements where rise or the owner of the building would manage that space. They would manage scheduling of that space. So if anybody wanted to use it, they had somebody to reach out to where they could schedule the use of that space. Um, they had, um, promotion of the spaces to all these different entities. So. within local newspapers, at the schools, at the public libraries. I know Medford has a brand new library and we want to make sure we're getting the word out there that this space is available for use to anyone. It is sort of catered to Medford public schools at the moment. The job training that they're doing is incredible. And I think we want to support that. That's one of our goals at Rises to support the future of the industry. So it is catered to that, but that space is open to the public.
[Andre Leroux]: Jackie, you had unmuted. I didn't know if you wanted to say something.
[Jacqueline McPherson]: Yes, Andre, thank you. This is Vice Chair Jackie Patato. I wanted to just say to all the presenters and the proponent that for one, I want to thank you just like Klaes and Chrissy has previous to me on taking into consideration all the recommendations for one. But the one that I noted the most was the contextual nature of the building itself and your willingness to want to adapt that to the actual community character that was, um, that was significant to me. And the fact that you're even dealing with the transportation issues. And I know that there's not a lot to, um, there's not a lot of options to mitigate there, but the fact that you took that time to, um, go through that with MassDOT and the city, uh, the transportation stuff, I wanted to commend you on that and just, um, again, just highlight my, thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Jackie. Appreciate the comments and I credit to the design team and the teams we have on the project here. They've been incredible on all this work. So. Thank you all. Thank you, Jackie. Director Hunt, you had unmuted.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, thank you. I actually wanted, I have a couple of things that I want to ask about in the context of the board, but I actually wanted to very specifically was we were just talking about the public space and I was hoping you could speak a little bit to parking to use the public space because that, I mean, that is really, it's not set in the neighborhood. So people aren't just going to walk over easily and use it. So could you speak to that a little bit?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, sure. No, it's a, it's a great question. Uh, again, something we have another community space that we're, we're programming in, uh, uh, in Boston and Dorchester, uh, and we're getting the same questions over here as well. Um, so it's a great question. You know, obviously we don't want to have too much parking over here. We don't want to drive vehicles over here. But one of the things we're finding in other spaces, similar to this, that we're trying to incorporate into projects is a lot of community and public members who are using that space, especially if it's not the schools and the schools will, you know, find ways to shuttle their kids there or take buses or something for drop-offs. But those who are public using that space are typically going to be using it at night. Um, and after five o'clock, you know, and, and that's really when, uh, the parking underneath the building is going to open up a little bit more and there will be parking available down there. So that's usually how it would work on, on other projects. We're assuming that, um, you know, that space will be available. We have shared parking systems on other projects that are working great right now. And we expect that's going to be the same use over here. So. typically after five o'clock when most employees are heading home, other members of the public are gonna be coming to use that space and we'll have those spaces open to them in order to get into the space.
[Alicia Hunt]: So I will say that I do appreciate that and pre-pandemic space for groups to meet was a serious difficulty. I worked both with city boards and commissions and stuff that there literally are just not enough meeting rooms to go around, but also we did some community engagement efforts where trying to find four or five different places for people to get together in groups of eight to 10 was really difficult in the city of Medford. So I actually really appreciate that. As long as they, cause you know, we're gonna bring together people from across the city, they have to drive there probably. Although one hopes they would bicycle, but.
[Zac Bears]: The goal is to do everything we can to have them not drive, but if they're driving, we'll make it work too.
[Alicia Hunt]: So Andre, I have other like on other topics questions, but I'd be happy to have the board ask questions first too.
[Andre Leroux]: Okay, great. Yeah. And I know I have a few questions as well, but I wanna give the board members the opportunity. David.
[David Blumberg]: Thanks Andre. Just there are a number of items. let's say the transportation improvements or steps to mitigate the impact of additional traffic to and from the site, where you've given us a really good and thoughtful list of things that would measure as improvements, you know, joining the TMA. ride sharing arrangements and that sort of stuff. A lot of it phrased in terms of we expect to. And I guess my question is, throughout the presentation, how do we get from the expect to, to the it's going to happen? And how do we ensure that some of these things do happen?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I'll turn that over to Ryan White at VHB to help me answer that. Thank you. Thank you for your comment, David.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I think there's a mix of this. Mystic Valley Parkway is a DOT roadway, so we've had good initial conversations with them. They are very supportive of us continuing it, but it's a long design process that needs to kind of get sorted out and make sure that the entity that's controlling the roadway is okay with these improvements. I think talking with Todd Blake, too, at the city, basically all the improvement that he is asking for aligns with some of the stuff that the state is interested in installing as well. As far as the TMA or the TDM pieces, there's portions of that that the building owner and the proponent and Quinn and rise can provide on site, providing zip cars joining a TMA providing a shuttle service but it's really up to the employers themselves the future tenants of the building to provide subsidies for their employees to provide pre-tax sales. So that's why I say it's something that Quinn will encourage. RISE is trying to do everything that they physically can do to the building and the infrastructure to support it, to promote those services. But there is a piece of the TDM especially that it is on the employer itself.
[Andre Leroux]: David, did you have other questions?
[David Blumberg]: I mean, does the public space fall into that in that camp as well? I mean, there's, I understand the D O T because you can't make the state do something. I don't think anyone on the call tonight can assure that those will happen, but can make a good effort toward attempting to accomplish them. But, um, I mean, we only. We only have our recommendation tonight and then ZBA and then you're off to the races right so maybe the city could answer this question how do we, how do we make sure that the rise or if there's a successor to rise that's actually going to be managing the building that as many of these amenities improvements, whatever we want to call them, come to fruition as, as possible. I realized it's some of it's up to tenants and it's leasing up the building and that sort of stuff that makes sense to me. But we still, I think as, as a community, we want to make sure that as many of these come through as possible.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And, and I can, I can hop in first for that too. Um, you know, for the, for the community space itself, that is a commitment that we're making and we will be designing the building to that standard. Um, so, uh, that's, that's something that we can commit to as, um, you know, the, the, the, um, tenants start coming into the building, they're just going to be tenants, you know, they're not going to actually own the space. So the owner of the space will be able to determine what happens in that space. And I think those are agreements that we can work on, uh, to make sure that they are in place and stay in place, uh, through whatever, uh, you know, tenant agreements or transactions happen down the road. And I think the commitment here tonight would be that we are going to work on those and ensure that that space is available, um, for for as long as we can make it available to the public. So it's really important to us. It's important to rise, to have these sort of things incorporated into our projects. So we'll do what we can to make sure that that is a commitment that can stay there. So I don't know if anyone from the city wants to add to that, feel free to.
[Alicia Hunt]: I guess I think it might actually be helpful if you could Because I don't want to misspeak on anything or misspeak for you. Sort of either reiterate or explain again, what is sort of the ownership structure rises proposing to build this building? Do you then sell it to someone else? Do you stay on as management and you're leasing the spaces? What is the structure that you're looking at there?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, no, it's a great question. And, you know, I think it's, you know, No, no one wants to predict the future of, you know, what's going to happen. We are currently owning the space with the Matarazzo family. So we're, we have an agreement with the Matarazzo family to design and build something over here. Uh, so that's the agreement that's in place right now. Um, I, we've had no intentions of changing that agreement as we've been working through the permitting and design processes. We have no intention. So. changing that at the moment. So we are the owners. We're partnering with the Matarazzo family who is the current owner. So that's the ownership structure right now.
[Alicia Hunt]: Okay, because when I then think about that, because we'll talk about the conditions that this board is going to recommend to the zoning board. Conditions are checked at certificate of occupancy. So if conditions aren't met, then there is no certificate of occupancy and you know how that works. I was thinking about things like joining a transportation management program. And there was the comment about providing MBTA passes or vouchers or discounts. And truly, it's the company that moves in that leases the space that then does that for the employees. But it would seem to me that it could be written into your certificate of occupancy that it would be written into the leases that if they want to lease the space, have to participate in the transportation management program, that they have to provide benefits to their employees around MBTA passes or blue bike membership or something like that. And so I think what we're probably going to start to do now is float the various conditions and this is the time to which are the ones, if there are any that we're suggesting that you don't think you can live with or the Matarazzo family can't live with, then we need to know that now, because if they're written into the permit, we'll be checking them at the end of the project.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, no, it's a great comment. I might defer to Ryan and maybe even to Michael Parker, who's our zoner attorney, who's on the call today, just to see how it's typically structured. I think they have a lot more experience than I in that particular field. So, Ryan, I don't know if you want to hop in real quick.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I will say on the infrastructure pieces, and in addition to the city permitting process that we're going through, parcel is also subject to MEPR jurisdiction. So the project is or will be reviewed by DOT. We will have section 61 findings. So we will have another set of mitigation commitments that are within that go along with the state process in addition to the local process as well.
[Unidentified]: You're still on mute.
[Alicia Hunt]: Sorry, I clicked. I probably muted myself. I do note that you haven't chosen to do that first and to come here saying this is what they're requiring of us. Because they're not, I would say if we require transportation management and they require, it's the same transportation management. They're not additive. If we require 10% electric vehicle charging and they require 10%, doesn't add up to 20, But if they require 15, then our 10% is moot. You have to meet their 15%, that type of thing. And who knows what they'll put on it? We've seen all kinds of things. And I just want to say, I love the project. I love what it looks like. I think it's a great fit for Medford, but now we're making it better.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and I'll add to that. Everything that was presented tonight, we plan on you know, doing whatever we can to make it happen. You know, so it's not, you know, it's not to say that we're not going to do any of these things. It's, I think, Alicia, director, what I think you're getting at is how do we actually make it, you know, in writing or in actual commitment, right? So I completely understand that and we'll do whatever we can to make that happen with you.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. And I think it's very important to us that the conditions we put on here, are ones that make the project a better project, a better project for the residents of Medford and are achievable. We're not gonna ask you to only rent to blue people because that's not achievable. So I wanna make sure that we're asking for what's good for Medford, but we can do, right? You can't make this site not flood, but you can protect it from flooding, so. I don't know, Andre, David, do you guys have more things you want to ask about? As I started to allude to, some of my specifics are going to be around the climate and energy.
[Andre Leroux]: I do have a few things. I'm waiting for the other board members to weigh in. Deanna, I don't know if you, do you have any questions?
[Deanna Peabody]: No, I agree with everybody. I think it's a great project and I think it looks great. I just wanted to mention that I saw that Todd Blake had submitted another letter. I didn't know if the team had seen that and if they had any comments on that new letter with an additional mitigation thought that he had had. It was in today's materials.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I don't think that I've seen that. I have not seen that letter either, Deanna.
[Jacqueline McPherson]: Okay. Deanna, is that the one regarding the U-turn if it was not, if it cannot happen? Okay.
[Deanna Peabody]: Whether the U-turns should be signalized or not, or the left turns into the site. So I don't know. That was just something I had seen. So my question, one question is, I'm assuming, is there, is the functional design report the next step for, as far as mass DOT? is concerned. I know a lot of times their review process can be long and they can keep adding things. So I just wanted to get a better understanding on how the process will work with all the different things at different intersections. Can you talk about what the next step is?
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, sure. So like I mentioned, the next step is really us filing an environmental impact report with MEPA, which will happen soon. In that report, it includes a full transportation impact assessment done per DOT standards, which is very similar to the TIS that we prepared and submitted with this application. Within that DOT report will have draft section 61 findings, which summarizes the mitigation commitments that I outlined in this project that have been really identified by Todd and have allowed us to help mitigate some of the limited impacts we have. Once we get a MEPA certificate with this project, that section 61 finding is finalized, which then allows us to basically start with the concept elements that were within DOT jurisdiction. At that point in time, we will start coordinating with the District 4 office, which maintains this area. The first step is to pull together a pre-25% design scoping meeting. We'll do an intersection control evaluation for the intersections that we're touching, including the mid-block crossing. And that's basically where we'll work with DOT to work out the feasibility of that. And if through that process, DOT deems it worthy and safe and beneficial for the area as a whole, really irrespective of this project, we'll start moving forward with the design reviews and we'll do 25, 50, 75 kind of through the whole DOT process. Thank you.
[Deanna Peabody]: So there's a long way before we even get to 25.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: Yes, and as you know, it's a back and forth. But I mean, even with this building, I mean, this building itself needs to be designed. So as we're designing the off-site infrastructure and improvements, we'll also be working on the actual architecture and design of the internal building itself. So those will run in parallel with each other.
[Deanna Peabody]: Sounds good.
[Andre Leroux]: Thank you, Deanna. So Amanda, I know I was wondering if they have the latest from Todd Blake, if you could just make sure they have that letter.
[Amanda Centrella]: I'm terribly sorry, guys. I just sent an email to you, Quinlan, and a few members of your team for reference.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, no worries. Thank you.
[Andre Leroux]: Thank you, Amanda. Appreciate it. Maybe in a little bit, if you have time to digest it during the meeting, we can come back to that. But I do have a few questions about the ring road and the perimeter in particular. And I'm wondering if you could walk us through the width of the ring road. I know that the fire department requires significant width for the perimeter. emergency vehicles, but could you just walk us through that? I love the fact that you're incorporating these pavers to reduce the impact of that. I'm wondering if those are gonna be permeable to water and I wanna make sure that's as sort of wide as possible and that the drive, the asphalt areas as narrow as possible. A couple other questions I have is when you pull into the ring road, since now it's a one-way The parking spaces that are right in front of the retail area, you're pulling in onto the left-hand side, which is a little unusual. I'm wondering if there's any safety concerns or design concerns with that. And in terms of the perimeter fencing, I'm wondering if you have any kind of renderings of what that's gonna look like. I'm really happy that you took away the kind of solid six foot fencing, but I'm wondering, are we talking about kind of like iron rail fencing, or what are we looking at there? Those are a few things.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, thank you so much. I think probably a combination of MDLA and Cube 3 on here to answer some of those questions. So I'll turn it over to them. I don't know if either one of you want to hop in first.
[John Intoppa]: Yeah, to speak on the road width, I believe we're holding 20 feet wide for one way. to allow it to function as a fire service access, maintaining 28-foot turning radii around the corners of the building. I'm not sure, Ryan, if you want to hit on any safety concerns with the parallel parking scheme. I just don't want to speak out of turn.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I think with the parallel parking scheme, it's just that that's kind of where the corner retail is. That's where the lobby is. We've intentionally designed those spaces to be wider than the typical space. I don't know if we can bring up the site plan again, like the landscape portion, we need to maintain the width of the driveway to allow for heavy vehicles and fire trucks to access the site. But via an informed design of width pavers or width striping, we're trying to artificially narrow that, which will give some additional room to vehicles that are parked in that short-term drop-off pickup area. though, so it's not going to be a typical kind of seven foot parallel parking space, it will be much more generous than that.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: Okay, sorry, go ahead. I just wanted to answer your question on the material, and then the railing as well. The material for the paver zone. We can discuss using permeable pavers with this being a vehicular situation. We just need to make sure that that type of paving system will work with, especially near the loading area where there's a little bit larger trucks driving over that aisle to back into the loading dock. But it's definitely something that we can discuss with VHB as well. That's also five feet wide currently, that paver zone around the drive, leaving 15 feet of asphalt. And then regarding the perimeter fence, the material, I apologize for not providing a picture, but it is a vertical picket, 42-inch high guardrail. The pickets need to be four inches on center. You can see in the rendering here, right along the property line. But with this being really close, obviously to the ring road, it needs to be vehicular rated for any crash ratings. And then with it also being close to pedestrian walkways, we're leaving it at 42 inches high to meet code there with the way the walls start to fall as you walk or go towards the north part of the site. But the idea is that it's a little more transparent. We're rendering it as black material currently. And we'll work on that product selection as we move forward.
[Andre Leroux]: And just a question. Looking at this rendering, just to the right of the fencing, it looks like there's a walkway. Does that exist currently? And is that on the other property side of the property line?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, so, um, we have a slide in the appendix D, but I don't know if you want to go to it, but, um, the, uh, so that's on the other side of the property that's actually currently, um, so there's a fence there today. Yeah, you could see it here. So that fence that's there today on the existing conditions is the same location as the fence in our property. So there's actually today, uh, parking spaces along that it's a small sliver of a parcel. there's parking spaces along that that are actually blocked off today. So you can't actually drive into those or get to them or do much over there. So that's what it looks like today. Just for the rendering concept, we wanted to make sure that we were putting something there that might actually, we don't think that that's gonna stay parking spaces forever. So we just wanted to put something that might actually happen over there, so. But it is that belongs to the adjacent property. Correct. Yeah, that's the adjacent property owner who we are working with and in conversations with.
[Andre Leroux]: To get to that closed off piece of asphalt, is that through your property or is that through the adjacent property?
[Zac Bears]: There's two gates. There's one on the sidewalk that you can walk through, and then there's another gate that's on the property from the parking lot today. Um, that I, we believe, we don't know, but we believe that that parking area was used by Brattucci's at some point. And we're not really sure what happened or when that fence actually got put up, but, uh, it just essentially blocks off that entire parcel.
[Andre Leroux]: So you don't anticipate that there'll be parking there access to that parking? No, no. Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: We don't anticipate anything like that there isn't today. And we don't think that, uh, there, there will be in the future either.
[Andre Leroux]: PB, Harmon Zuckerman, PB – Hermit): Thank you, and with this, thank you for the clarification, so my understanding is that there's going to be 15 feet of asphalt five feet of pavers along the ring roll ring road is that correct. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, PB – Hermit): yeah. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, PB – Hermit): And is there other additional other sidewalks around the building or is the idea that those papers would function as a sidewalk around the building.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: There is a sidewalk. It doesn't go all the way around the building. Steve, if you wanna pull up this overall site plan. But on the east side, there's a concrete sidewalk that runs that length of the building. And then also on the west side or north on the top side of this page that connects for doors along that side as well, up to the garage entry.
[Unidentified]: Okay.
[Andre Leroux]: And the loading entrance there, does that entrance go below grade at all or is that just at grade?
[John Intoppa]: That's at grade.
[Andre Leroux]: And is there a retaining wall in the rear of the property? Yes.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: How high is that retaining wall? So the way the site falls, the wall is basically at grade, as you can see here, closer to Mystic Valley Parkway. And I know along the south, or sorry, the bottom of the page here, that length goes to about seven and a half feet tall at that corner right there.
[Andre Leroux]: And then going up from there, how does the height change?
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: Sorry, I just gotta pull up the grading plans here one moment. So in the upper, I'll just refer to it this way, the upper right corner, it's about five and a half feet in that corner. Midway along that west drive, it's about four feet, and then it goes to basically zero at the end of the wall. And this all relates to the flood plain elevations that we're working with the building.
[Andre Leroux]: Right, so I'm just trying to understand, because the adjacent properties don't have retaining walls. So I'm just trying to visualize what this is going to look like. Can you help me with that?
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: Starting at the drive surface, there'll be a six-inch curb. There's, I think at the narrowest, it's a six-inch decorative stone strip, and then the top of the wall will be flush with that surface. We'll have a 42-inch guardrail, and then the vertical face of the wall will show around the outer edge. We're still working on the exact material of that wall, but with the proximity to the parking below grade, we know it at least have to have a cast in place concrete core. And then we'll work with the client on exactly what the face of that material will be.
[Andre Leroux]: But since there's no retaining, what does it look like from the adjacent properties, I guess? Is that the wall basically at grade with the other properties?
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: It's taller. So any height elevations that I referred to earlier are above the adjacent properties. So the exposed sides, faces of the wall will be visible from the neighboring properties. And it's sloping. So I don't think anyone from the civil side of things is on, correct, Clint?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I was looking to see if Mark Junkins was on.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, the top of the wall is roughly at elevation 11. So on our site, it appears to be a level wall, and then it's sloping from left to right on this page. So the wall is taller towards the north side of the site. So in terms of visibility of the wall, the neighboring property at the top of this page, is interacting with this wall the most where to the north or the right side of this page in the south is the wooded area as well as the wetlands. Right. Okay. And again, the drive is maximized for the fire, you know, what's required by the fire marshal and the architectural team, you know, explain the reasons for the width of the building and what's required for these lab spaces.
[Claes Andreasen]: I ask a couple of follow-up questions on that.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Go ahead, Chris.
[Claes Andreasen]: Thanks, Andre. Does the road slope down to the back
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: currently it slopes. So at the at the road, or at the curb cut, let's just say the south or the bottom curb cut here, you're roughly at elevation 10. And it does go up to meet sort of the door, it goes up at the end of the parallel parking spaces. We need to get up to elevation 11.35 for those doors. And then it holds that elevation pretty much around the whole building all the way to the garage ramp. And I apologize, I'm not the right person to explain the reasoning behind the elevation of the building. I don't know if someone else could explain that.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, we do have a civil engineer from BHP who's on the team. Unfortunately, I don't think one of them could make it tonight. But we're looking in to see if we can get someone on the call as well. Hopefully we can get somebody on. But I apologize, the civil team has looked into that stormwater and has designed that.
[Claes Andreasen]: Yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more about the placement of the road. And You know how you're dealing with stormwater, I mean it does seem seven feet is is a serious wall, you know, and, and I guess what I'm wondering about is, you know, the adjacent properties obviously are or didn't, you know, use the same method to sort of level the site. I guess that's part of my questions. Why are you so drastically trying to level the site? Does it have to do with the trucks in particular and their ability to mitigate that slope? Or are there other reasons? But what I'm sort of imagining is down the road, in either of the adjacent lots or other lots along this strip, you know, if every building that comes in does this, then you're essentially gonna have this wall up against the wetland. And I'm wondering how that sort of, you know, would affect that wetland. And I know it's sort of, would be on a case-by-case basis, but I'm sort of wondering what, why, you know, what the drainage in the site and how it's affected by, you know, basically this plinth that you're building. It'd be good to have a drawing spot elevation.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, we can absolutely follow up with that. I appreciate that. We'll make sure to, um, get the same one to near on that as well.
[Claes Andreasen]: Yeah, I think, I think if you could just present a holistic view of all the things that are going on those walls and drainage and all that, that would be good. I mean, I mean, I think for us it's important because we, you know, we hopefully you know, this isn't the first project or the, sorry, this isn't the last project that, you know, we see in this area, so.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and we will have to go through the Conservation Commission process as well. So they're, you know, they'll typically provide an order of conditions on what happens in that area as well. So that's worth noting as well, but.
[Andre Leroux]: Yeah, I think that's my, that's my concern too. what kind of precedent does this serve and how it impacts the adjacent properties, I think is a pretty important question. I think you've done a great job in terms of the design issues that we've talked about, but I think that's a pretty big issue.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I just confirmed that you have not filed with the Conservation Commission, right? The intention was to do that after this was resolved.
[Zac Bears]: That's correct. Yep.
[Alicia Hunt]: I'm wondering if it would make sense to do a preliminary meeting with the Conservation Commission. Something to get like a before we file perspectives on things.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I know, I'm not sure if Michael wants to hop in here real quick. I know we're just under this camera, so.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: Sure. No, thank you, Alicia. So, yeah, I think that's a great idea, and I think VHB has reached out to the CONCOM just to start those discussions, if I'm not mistaken, and you're absolutely right. Those prefiling discussions are critically important.
[Alicia Hunt]: Okay, let us let us know how that's staffed out of my office as well. So definitely feel free to loop me and Victor in on that at all. Especially because it's coming up through the Community Development Board. I feel like it right, this board would very much respect what they had to say if they haven't seen it yet, then we're sort of second guessing them. But we'd like to support what they have, they will also put their own conditions on this.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: Yeah, as you can imagine, I mean, they're going to be very concerned with erosion runoff, supply of stormwater to make sure that the wetlands aren't starved, you know, the protection of wetlands and other properties. And I'm sure it will be very comprehensive in that manner.
[Andre Leroux]: Yeah, I'd love to kind of get their feedback so that we're on the same page about it.
[Zac Bears]: Will do.
[Andre Leroux]: Thank you for talking about that. One other question that I have is, well, small question, is just that the pedestrian, the sidewalks with the entrances, I want to make sure we're clear that the pedestrian crossing of the Ring Road will be at grade. Is that correct?
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: At the parkway sidewalks? Yes. Yes, yes, absolutely.
[Andre Leroux]: And I'm sure you've seen some of the recent Boston Globe coverage. This is a different issue. But since this is being built on spec and you've gone into some detail around why a lab building differs from an office building, I'm just curious if market conditions change How adaptable will this design be for other uses?
[MCM00000596_SPEAKER_15]: Can I take that one on, Quinn? Yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you. So I'd like to say that, well, a rectangle is a square, but a square is not a rectangle. The other way around, right? Office buildings can easily fit into a lab building. What we have is higher floor to floor, so you'll have an office building know, larger floor to floor heights and ample space within the trend, the interstitial spaces, the, uh, we, we get asked all the time, especially with the market demand right now, you know, can I turn something existing into a lab building? We're doing it everywhere. Uh, and we can always pack things in and it's really difficult, uh, to fit lab into an office building. Uh, but they are very easily backwards compatible.
[Andre Leroux]: Director Hunt, I know you had a few other things you wanted to bring up.
[Alicia Hunt]: I was mostly noting that you talked about sort of like broad, like your understanding around energy. You gave us like a briefing on greenhouse gases and embodied energy, et cetera. And I just wanted to be clear on what you're committing to here, what would you condition this on? Are you committing to an all-electric building?
[MCM00000596_SPEAKER_15]: No, no, we are not committing to an all-electric building. And anyone who's out there committing to an all-electric lab building is getting themselves into a world of hurt. We are not. We are committing to be all-electric ready. We will make sure that the space is there so that when that day comes, and whenever that is, that the grid one can handle all buildings being all electric, and that the grid is clean enough to make that switch over, we will have the room in the building and in these mechanical spaces to make those changes.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I thought I heard you say, you mentioned solar panels and green roof and a lot of stuff on the, in the large penthouse, and I didn't really get the impression you could do all of that.
[MCM00000596_SPEAKER_15]: Yeah, and we can work with you for certain on which avenue you would like to go in, but if you look at a lab roof, there is a lot of elements that are rejecting heat or humidity or water vapor. Those areas cannot support, it would degradate the panels too much. Those panels cannot be over those types of systems. In the remaining roof area, whether that is more of a push to solar, and that makes sense, we can certainly support that. Whether it's a mix of where it's a 50-50 and you want to see some green roof up on there, or if we just want to do all green roofs, we certainly can. We will have remaining roof area left. It's not going to be a significant enough space to do something dramatic with the amount of electricity that we would make. But all steps help. So we can certainly work with you and your staff to determine with what is left. Do photovoltaics or green roofs make more sense?
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. Because I will say if I might, because this is actually my area of expertise, This building is really set in green fields of green. I do think we are looking at more hard development along this edge, but with the park and the wetlands, there's not actually producing a lot of electricity. I think we'd love to see solar panels on it. If you thought that you could do enough solar panels to make an array cost effective worthwhile, right? Like there's some point where you just don't have enough roof space to even bother. So I think that it would be my recommendation to the board to include something around available roof space should be used for solar panels. And if it was deemed that solar was not practical, then a green roof alternative would be acceptable. We'd like to see it, if you think you can do some.
[MCM00000596_SPEAKER_15]: Yeah, Quinn, if I may, when we get deeper into schematic design or design development, and we have the penthouse starting to solidify and understanding what's coming through, we certainly could commit, if it would appease the board, to do a solar study and see where that lies and get a solar consultant of who, you know, there's a lot of design build firms that take care of these things. and see what we would be able to output and have the discussion of whether it makes sense holistically or not.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I will say that our building code or zoning does include a requirement for zoning where what it says is you must do a solar study. And then it goes on to basically say if it's found that solar is not practical on this roof or the roof, then you don't have to do it. It also says, or if the building is not structurally sound, which basically means talks to renovations. If you're building a building today, that building by code will be structurally sound to hold solar, whether or not there's space for it. Some of our renovation buildings, we're not requiring that you then renovate to a level that the roof could hold solar. So yeah. COB, Erika Vandenbrande): As a required, I think that the requirement for solar study is in our building code or zoning code now i'm.
[Andre Leroux]: PB, David Ensign — PB — David Ensign — COB, Erika Vandenbrande — Michael Parker unmuted himself.
[Alicia Hunt]: COB, Erika Vandenbrande — Right, I would say i'm the person that you would end up submitting that to to review. Sure.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: COB, Dan Burke – He, Him, His): So director hunt i'm just just in full disclosure, I share the city of Boston's conservation Commission. And I have done so for the last six years and for no compensation, but my compensation is I veer off of jurisdiction and ask questions just like you're asking right now. And I know that the struggle with the roof issue is, you know, the mix of, you know, reflective materials, light materials, how much loading there is on the roof or green roof, and also the fact that photovoltaics are going to be more and more miniaturized as we go forward, right? So a lot of these, a lot of the proponents come in and they're gonna be like, you know, PV ready in 10 years, because they know in 10 years, you know, the small amount of space that they have now will actually be significant. So, you know, there's a lot of flexibility, a lot of changing technology, but you know, it's sort of a work in progress right now. But you're right, we will have to do a solar study pursuant to the zoning code anyway.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. Yeah. And then I think actually we wanted to just, you were touching this, you ended up discussing this because the board members were also asking about sort of the flooding, the storm hardening protection around storm surge, et cetera. So I think you actually hit on a number of those things. You talked about LEED Gold, and I'm wondering how you feel about that being in the conditions.
[MCM00000596_SPEAKER_15]: I honestly lead gold is with the high efficiency systems that lab buildings use is relatively easily obtainable. So we would absolutely commit to that. And we've committed as an architect to the client to look at paths towards platinum. So we would be looking to get as far as we can within reason.
[Alicia Hunt]: I think we appreciate that because we like to be able to say that that these buildings are are going that way it's really important to the city that the energy efficiency that the care to the whole whole environment.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: Director Hunt, if I may, just one thing on that. And I think that Brian's absolutely correct. I mean, that's where a building like this naturally goes anyway. What I see in these conditions generally, because there's a lot of interplay in the LEED gold standards and the points that you get is a condition that the building be LEED certifiable so that there's some sort of leeway there, the flexibility to design the building in a very efficient manner.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I just will note, I like to say this for the record, being LEED and LEED certifiable and energy efficient are not always synonymous. And there, we just built a library and it is net zero on site. And it is an amazing building, but we're still not sure if our LEED certification is gonna be silver and gold. And you know, The things that go into it, if we had decided to put a shower in our library, it would have helped. And we're like, we just couldn't give up that space, frankly.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: Right. And some of the point system itself, you query when you're looking at it is, what is one measure get 20 points and another that is much more important in your mind or for the building design gets two? Right. Yeah.
[Victor Schrader]: Great, thank you. I have a quick one. Quinlan, when we met with the fire chief, he asked about additional hydrant locations on site. Did you guys look into that further? Do you have an update on that, specifically the access to a hydrant in the rear corner of the building?
[Zac Bears]: Um, yeah, I believe we did. I'm not sure if MDLA, if you have any other information on that, that was our civil engineer again. Uh, so, um, so they would definitely have that answer, but I'm not sure if MDLA also worked on that too. Uh, but if you want to jump in.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, I apologize. I do not have that information. Okay.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, that was our civil engineer, but we did look into providing that at the, at the rear of the building. So we can absolutely follow up with that as well.
[Victor Schrader]: The chief included in his letter, it's item nine. So as we're looking through, thinking about conditions and want to usually just include, you know, the letters as conditions that is in there.
[David Blumberg]: Great.
[Andre Leroux]: I don't know if any of the, if the team has been able to process the, uh, that recent letter from Todd Blake that Amanda just, just sent around, but if you want to have, uh, address that at all. That'd be great.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, I read it. I think Ryan White might've read it too. I'll, I'll just turn it over to him. I think it was, uh, just so we know, I think it was surrounding a, um, a potential U-turn at, uh, the Wellington Plaza left turn going eastbound. Um, so I'll let Ryan hop in on that, um, quickly. Go ahead, Ryan.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, Todd's newest request was to put a new signalized intersection on Mystic Valley Parkway to support some of the U-turn movements. I can say in our study that U-turn movement right now is illegal, so we didn't utilize that turning movement at all, and we utilize the legal U-turn movements that are allowed either at Locust Street or within the Wellington Circle project. And we're confident, obviously, through the analysis that those intersections can process those volumes to acceptable standards. Adding another signalized intersection on, I mean, I expect DOT would have concerns about adding another signalized intersection. along Mystic Valley Parkway in close proximity to Wellington Circle, as well as even just down the road, we're looking at adding another potential stopping location at the mid-block crossing, which I think is a more important connection, especially for the bicycle and pedestrian transit connections that we're trying to promote to this site in this area, and having a traffic control at that mid-block crossing to me at least makes more sense than trying to encourage an illegal U-turn movement by signalizing the driveway at that time. I just read the letter 10 minutes ago, but that's my first reaction to it.
[Andre Leroux]: Understood. I think I would have similar concerns as well. All right, any other questions or comments from board members or city staff? Let's also, if there are any members of the public who would like to speak that may be present, please feel free to raise your hands, ask questions in the chat. or use the OCD email or telephone number that we read out at the beginning of the meeting? I assume, Amanda, you haven't received any comments.
[Amanda Centrella]: I have not, but if you don't mind, I'm just going to check the box one last time. Yes, nothing yet.
[Andre Leroux]: Well, I think, uh, you know, you've, you've really responded to so many of what, of the things that we've raised. Uh, unfortunately I wish the city, the civil engineer folks were here today. Um, you know, my, my own preference would be to not have a seven and a half foot retaining wall around the property. Um, because I'm not really certain how that's going to affect adjacent development, or even if it doesn't get development, what happens to those parcels? There is the open space behind the site that would seem to really cut the site off from that, so I'd much rather see a gradient that was more on par with the adjacent parcels, and I don't know Obviously, you guys probably looked at that whether, you know, how feasible that is or why this is the solution that's preferred here. But I'd like to hear more information about that before, you know, we take a vote. So if we could have, if we could continue this meeting and maybe encourage you guys to have a preliminary meeting with the Conservation Commission in the meantime, before, you know, you come back to us and we can kind of be all be on the same page with, with either accepting this as the preferred solution or an improved solution, that would be great.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, we could certainly look into that. And I just wanted to check with the team here on potentially getting uh, timeframe of meeting with the conservation commission. I just want to make sure that we can get that meeting on the books. Um, I'm not sure if we do that tonight or if we can just follow up tomorrow on that, you know, we would want to make sure that we meet with them as soon as possible.
[Alicia Hunt]: I'm sorry, Quinn, was that a question? I was going to say that I realized that it's really the, so the difficulty is that they're going to want to look at something, I would think, before meeting with you so that they could pose intelligent comments at the meeting. I assume you would have stuff you could send them immediately that would not be the NOI filing, or would you want some time to put something together appropriate for them? We're not asking you to do the full NOI filing.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: Yeah. Go ahead.
[Zac Bears]: Go ahead, Michael.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: Yeah, sure. So if I could respond to that, I think that the area that we focused on is the back of the site there with the retaining wall at this point. And I'm sure we have enough information to at least get a get a quick evaluation from staff is how the CONCOM would feel about it. I think it's a pretty, how should I put this? I'm not gonna say cut and dry because wetlands are always complicated, but if we limited the scope to, hey, they're thinking of this retaining wall, we're looking at the abutting properties, what are you thinking is like a standard order of conditions or what concerns would the Conservation Commission have? I think we're ready to have that conversation. if that makes sense.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah. Let me check one thing. I actually, as you were speaking, messaged the environmental agent who staffs them.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: And please don't tell me they take the summer off.
[Alicia Hunt]: They do have on their books a meeting next week. I do not know if they are expecting to meet, It sort of, it depends on whether they have filings. Does any of my other staff know if they're planning? There's, I mean, their agenda is never published this early. Obviously it being almost eight o'clock at night, I cannot tell you if I will get a response from the environmental agent right now. or not.
[Zac Bears]: We could follow up tomorrow as well. That's that's fine.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, he's not replying. The next one. They technically meet the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays. They do not just take off the summer. They'll meet as needed. They hold the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays and then but they actually only hold the meetings if they have filings to review.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: Great, thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: So the next One technically would be July 6th. So yeah, I don't think I'm gonna get a response in the next few minutes. I'll let you know if he gets back to me tonight.
[Zac Bears]: Perfect, thank you, director, appreciate it.
[Alicia Hunt]: When you reach out to him, just copy me.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, director, appreciate your help there, thanks.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah.
[Amanda Centrella]: I think some of the difficulty and we can figure this out, but is that when we continue a hearing, it has to be done to a date certain, or a meeting, I'm sorry. So I'm wondering if there's a sweet spot between with the assumption that, or the understanding that if for whatever reason, we're not able to orchestrate a preliminary meeting with CONCOM, prior to the next meeting that we continue to, we could open it and then continue to another date certain happens all the time with, I see it like on the ZBA as well.
[Andre Leroux]: Yeah, so the information that I think we've asked for around the retaining wall, I mean, we're happy to reconvene as soon as you think it convenient to do so. I was just suggesting, you know, for the purpose of trying to be as efficient as possible and hopefully not getting contradictory feedback from us in the con com, you know, sequencing it that way, but we'll defer to you guys if you have a preference for when to come back to us.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I mean, I go ahead, direct us. All right. Yeah. I mean, uh, um, I think we have the materials, um, to, to come back with, and we'll definitely follow up with our civil team as well. Um, so I don't, I don't think that for, for meeting with the CD board, we need much time, uh, in between this meeting and the next meeting with the CD board. Um, so, so we're happy to pull that information together for you guys and continue working with the conservation commission as well.
[Victor Schrader]: If it's helpful, the Zoning Board of Appeals next meeting is the 30th of this month. So that gives two weeks. And it is a process to go through all of the conditions. That may be something we can also do in the meantime to help streamline the conversation, as we've done that for projects in the past, to summarize the conditions and then give the board the ability to look through those.
[Andre Leroux]: Are you suggesting that we reconvene before the 30th?
[Victor Schrader]: I guess I am suggesting that if possible. But also just want the board to be aware that that's the date that this project was planning to go before the ZBA. Just for scheduling purposes, just to know.
[Andre Leroux]: Well, I'm happy to look at dates if we want to do that right now. Wednesday the 22nd I know works for me. There any, any other conflicts, Amanda there or board members, how do you feel about the 22nd?
[Amanda Centrella]: Sorry, just pulling up a couple of calendars. I don't think I have the conflict and then I want to pull up the city calendar.
[Alicia Hunt]: I did. Um, the bicycle advisory commission meets that night and there's Arlington is having a meeting that is relevant to some stuff we're interested in, but it's not a conflict.
[Jacqueline McPherson]: I have a conflict as well. Who does you do.
[Andre Leroux]: I do know the board members have conflicts.
[Deanna Peabody]: That works for me to 22nd. This is Deanna.
[SPEAKER_06]: This is Christie it works for me.
[Claes Andreasen]: Works for me as well.
[Alicia Hunt]: Would it help if we reviewed the other conditions now to make sure the board is all on board? I know Victor mentioned sending them around for people to look at. We have staff who have been catching a lot of these as we've been talking. We have long lists and previous spreadsheets.
[Andre Leroux]: If, is that Amanda, do you wanna, do you have that list that you wanna walk through? I think that makes sense. If we get on the same page for all of those, then we can limit the scope of the next meeting to really looking at the retaining wall and the grading.
[Amanda Centrella]: Yes, let me pull this up here. So a couple initial ideas about conditioning. So a commitment to being electric ready. when, you know, in the future for that full transition, that available roof space be used for solar panels, and if not feasible, a green roof would be acceptable. Committing to achieving the LEED Gold certification.
[Andre Leroux]: And then there were a number of the- We're saying certifiable, right? LEED Gold certifiable.
[Amanda Centrella]: Certifiable, sorry.
[Andre Leroux]: Thank you.
[Amanda Centrella]: And then there were a number of the transportation mitigation options that were laid out by the RISE team. And I wondered if we wanted to spend some time thinking a little bit about what makes sense to condition, what might be able to be written into a potential tenant agreement. And for those, it may even make some sense to if RISE wants to pull up those slides that kind of listed out the mitigation efforts.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, we could pull those together as well. Unless you'd like to go over them tonight, that's fine too.
[Andre Leroux]: Why don't we try to go over it tonight? That way we don't have to do it in the future.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: Could I just break in, if you don't mind, Mr. Chair?
[Andre Leroux]: Yes, sir.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: that issue. Just something that's occurred to me. I was trying to respond before we first talked about the TDM measures and I couldn't get in, but the proponent at this point is committed to join the Lower Mystic TDM organization. And director Hunt talked about things that, you know, that tenants would be able to do, or, you know, that might be required of tenants. And that's very hard to do from a landlord tenant perspective or an owner of a building perspective to write into the leases that it's a requirement that you have to provide pre-tax T passes available to your employees. What I would say is it's almost standard in this industry. I mean, that happens as a sort of a market condition anyway. But to me, the membership in the Lower Mystic TDM is actually critically important because they provide the education for a lot of those programs. And they do focus on these types of buildings, the tenants in the buildings. And the added advantage, I think, of the TDM program is they're also reactive. to conditions. So conditions for TDM measures that we talked about today might be obsolete in three or four or five years, right? They may not make sense depending on what happens with traffic flows. So, you know, I think foundationally, that's probably the most important commitment here.
[Alicia Hunt]: It's probably, I think, helpful for you to be aware that the TDM, the Lower Mississippi TDM, is a relatively new development in our area, which is why this board is not used to requiring that, and we haven't gotten to see its effectiveness yet. But I would leave it to the board. I just wanted to be clear on that, as to the board, what some of our board members actually have experienced with these from other TDMs in other areas, and can speak to that.
[Andre Leroux]: But Michael, what you're saying that you would be comfortable, the proponent would be comfortable with a commitment to join the TDM.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: Yes, that's my understanding. And if you look through their website, and I've had experience with others, I mean, they have, you know, I think it's a go ride app and things like that, that, you know, when when tenants are introduced to the building, clearly there can be a notice that this is a lower mystic TDM building, right? And provide all the resources in order to access any sorts of programs that the consortium, other buildings, other developers are doing in concert with the TDM.
[Andre Leroux]: Okay. The... The letter from Todd Blake, not the recent one, the most recent one, but the one before that, that listed out a number of transportation improvements. My impression is that you have met with him and support all of those conditions. You can meet them. Or was there any issue with anything in that letter?
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: In his first letter, I don't think we had any issues with any of the mitigation that he proposed in his initial letter.
[Andre Leroux]: And Ryan, is there additional measures that you've proposed that are not in there that we just want to capture?
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: Nope, not at this time. Basically, what I presented today is what is in our draft section 61 findings that I mentioned previously.
[Andre Leroux]: Can we just bring up that slide that Amanda was talking about just so we can review those points?
[John Intoppa]: I can bring up the slide to care. Could you just enlighten me which slide? I just wanna make sure I have the right one.
[Andre Leroux]: Amanda, which one were you referring to?
[Amanda Centrella]: Yeah, so there were, I think it was like a series of three slides and this was one of them that kind of started listing off each of the different mitigation efforts
[John Intoppa]: Got it. This is the first of the three. Thank you.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: Yes. Yeah, I think most of these elements are captured by Todd's letter, including the pedestrian crossing, the blue bike station, bicycle parking, the countdown signal heads, the buffer bike lanes. I think the only additional one probably above and beyond his letter was the showers on this slide, Amanda.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Okay.
[Andre Leroux]: Go to the next slide. I think we just, as we discussed, I think the umbrella condition would be to join the Lower Mystic Transportation Management Association. Actually, can we go back one more? I just wanted to make sure we're all set. So how much bike parking is being provided? Do we have that?
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: I don't think it's in here, but there currently is 10 bike parking spaces outdoor for public and visitor use. And I believe there are 42 spaces within the secured indoor area that would have the shower and locker room for building tenants.
[Andre Leroux]: If we could capture that in the conditions to say at least 10 outdoor and 42 indoor, that would be great, Amanda. Thank you. Next slide. You also, one question I have about this is that you mentioned that there would be 10% of the spaces would be EV, would have EV chargers. can, I'd like to kind of articulate that in the conditions.
[SPEAKER_03]: Any issue with that? Quinn?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, no, absolutely. You can absolutely do that. I'm not sure what that number is. It's 10% of 422, so 43. Thank you.
[Andre Leroux]: And are these the U-turn signage and the video detection? That's all part of the Todd Blake's letter, right? There's nothing.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_06]: Exactly. That's all part of his letter, including closing that third curb cut as well as in his letter.
[Andre Leroux]: Is there another slide or is that the last one?
[SPEAKER_03]: The next one is just the visual summary.
[Andre Leroux]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: Great. Thank you.
[Amanda Centrella]: Okay, and then I just want to review my notes really quick to make sure there wasn't something else.
[Andre Leroux]: We did talk about the public space, the indoor space with the classrooms and the meeting space. And I'm wondering, Director Hunt, you had mentioned some kind of concern about that. Do we need to condition some kind of MOU around that with the city?
[Alicia Hunt]: really think so. I think, you know, perhaps that there's an under, we should include that there is the spaces will be available to the public and that there'll be room spaces that can be, I don't want to say rented, signed up, signed out for, for community groups.
[Andre Leroux]: Okay.
[Alicia Hunt]: We've never had an MOU with any other organizations over it. It's more we, people would know where they can use them.
[Andre Leroux]: So, Amanda, do you think you have that, some kind of language around that?
[Alicia Hunt]: Something, yeah, yeah, I'll, yes. They will be providing public, or spaces for public, available for public meetings, public, public could use.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, we're happy to work out some language too and send it over to you guys on that.
[Alicia Hunt]: That'd be great. Yeah, okay. Okay. You'd be surprised at how happy that can make some people. The bike commission used to meet at Colleen's because they needed a space to meet.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, we were talking with that with the Mystic River Watershed Association too, is they were looking for spots to meet. So this could be that too.
[Alicia Hunt]: I meet with a couple of different regional climate organizations that are always looking for spaces to hold our meetings pre-pandemic and we'd love to meet again in person. Those tend to be daytime though, but we'll bring like all kinds of interesting fun or, you know, the EPA, the state,
[Andre Leroux]: Yeah. A couple of small questions about the parking. So is the retail, the three parking spaces in front of the retail, is that like 15 minute parking or what kind of parking is that going to be?
[Zac Bears]: Um, it, honestly, it hasn't really been decided yet. I was, I would assume that it's going to be some sort of pickup drop off parking, um, or just a limited amount of time. So that can be whatever, whatever, um, you know, it'll, it'll come down to what the retail actually becomes. So if it is some sort of cafe, it could be like half hour park and it could be our parking. We can make that flexible to what it needs to be. Um, but it's not, we haven't determined that just yet. Um, but if we need to determine that now we can do that as well.
[Andre Leroux]: That's fine. I just was curious because related to that, I was wondering how much visitor parking is going to be provided under the building.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I mean, we can, I guess the short answer is there will be visitor parking. It'll most likely be some sort of validation system. And I know you know, probably some of the architects have worked on similar projects. This could talk about how the parking works, but more than likely it'll be a validation system. So you'll be able to, you know, get validated tickets. Employees will have their own, you know, validation tickets. And if you're visiting, you'll be able to get a ticket and use that to get in and out of the parking space. So I don't know if there's a set number of visitor spaces or if it's, you know, what I see it as 422 shared parking spaces.
[Andre Leroux]: I just wanna make sure that there is parking for the retail accommodated within what you're proposing for parking.
[MCM00000596_SPEAKER_15]: Quinn and Michael, maybe I can make a recommendation that as we develop the plan, maybe a condition of the approval tonight is that we work with city staff, depending on the use of the retail to determine an appropriate amount of visitor parking.
[HK3G1-bENjA_SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, we're happy to do that, yeah.
[Andre Leroux]: Any other notes?
[Amanda Centrella]: Not from me.
[Andre Leroux]: Other board members, anything that we missed that you didn't hear? Okay, so I think we have a list of conditions and we will accept a motion to continue to 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 22nd to focus on the civil engineering aspects. Is there a motion from a board member to that effect? I'll make that motion.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: Thanks, class.
[Andre Leroux]: Is there a second? I second. Thank you, David. Roll call vote. Class Andresen? Aye. David Blumberg? Aye. Jackie, vice chair. Jackie Furtado?
[Adam Hurtubise]: Aye.
[Andre Leroux]: Christy Dowd?
[Adam Hurtubise]: Aye.
[Andre Leroux]: And we had Deanna. I'm not sure if she's still here.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Aye.
[Andre Leroux]: OK, thank you, Deanna. and I'm an aye as well. So thank you. We'll continue till the 22nd. Appreciate your patience on this.
[WpieqDvHvyY_SPEAKER_13]: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair, members of the board. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Have a good night. Thanks so much. Good night.
[Andre Leroux]: All right, the... Sorry, next item on the agenda is... Approval of board rules and regulations. I think we might have a motion to continue this one.
[David Blumberg]: Just need some time to take a look at it and read through our new zoning and make sure this thing lines up properly before asking the board to consider it and hopefully vote on it. I would make a motion to continue this item to our next meeting.
[Andre Leroux]: And let's try for the 22nd because we may be able to, hopefully that won't be too long with rise. Okay. Thanks. Thanks David for all your work on this. Appreciate it. And a lot of patients, cause I know it's been kind of floating from agenda to agenda for a long time, but thank you. Is there a second to David's motion? Second. Thanks, Kless. Roll call vote. Kless Andreessen. Aye. David Blumberg. Kristie Dowd.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Aye.
[Andre Leroux]: Vice Chair, Jackie Furtado.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Aye.
[Andre Leroux]: Deanna Peabody.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Aye.
[Andre Leroux]: And I'm an aye as well. Thank you. We'll continue that item to the 22nd. That just brings us to miscellaneous and other updates, which I will turn over to Amanda.
[Amanda Centrella]: Thank you. So just a reminder, I'll reach out to the couple of folks to grab some signatures for the plan sets for the two ways that we're recommending be accepted as public ways. So Freedom Way and Steve Miller Drive. And a couple of mint previous minutes. So just look for an email there. And I'm hoping to get dates from the our consultants working on the comprehensive plan. So just that'll be in your inbox. Keep your eyes peeled. So we can start scheduling for that. And then we're hoping to introduce a new member to the board soon. It's not like 100% confirmed yet, so I don't wanna, I'll just tease you with this now, but something to be excited about. And we're talking with a couple of other folks. So perhaps on our next meeting, maybe we'll see some new faces and yeah, just exciting.
[Alicia Hunt]: And then, oh, sorry. introduce it and we have several new interns in our office. Yes.
[Amanda Centrella]: And sorry, yes. So two of whom are joining us tonight. And I want to thank them for their attention and their help with this meeting. So we have Catherine Rin-Piasecki, as well as Patrick Snyder. And they've just joined us this week. So you may be seeing more of them.
[Alicia Hunt]: I'll be working specifically with Amanda on community development board stops. So you will be starting to hear from her. And I'll just let you know that we also have Lily Worth, who is actually working a lot between us and transportation. So with Todd and Amy, and to support them on a new bicycle master plan to bring some of the more formally bring transportation between our two offices. And Madeline Levin is working with us this summer on solid waste. We're about to, we're getting ready to announce a solid waste task force, and she's supporting us with, on that project.
[Andre Leroux]: So. All right, Wren, where are you coming from? Where are you, are you a student?
[MCM00001456_SPEAKER_03]: Yep, I am about to enter my second year at UEP at Tufts. So I'm a second year grad student in the urban and, urban planning and environmental policy. It's an acronym I can never remember.
[Andre Leroux]: Wonderful, thanks for helping us out.
[Jacqueline McPherson]: Thanks for having me, sir. Welcome, Ren. Welcome. I'm not sure if Patrick's still on, but you already know that Alicia's an alum of UEP as well, right? As well as myself.
[Alicia Hunt]: Not me. No, you're not. Sorry. Amanda is. Amanda's a UEP alum. I went to the other big planning school in Massachusetts. Office rivalry.
[Andre Leroux]: Great, well, thank you. Amanda, any other?
[Amanda Centrella]: One last thing. So just want to put it on your radar that we did receive an application for site plan review from Theory Wellness. It's a cannabis dispensary and it's on the sites proposed for 162 Mystic Ave. So that is going to take a little bit of time to get to you guys, because we still have to review all the materials, and then it goes and gets circulated to department heads for comment. But I just want you all to know that it is on the horizon. Thank you, Amanda.
[Andre Leroux]: Jackie, sorry we're scheduled for the 22nd when you can't make it, but at least we saved you a meeting.
[Jacqueline McPherson]: It's a meeting that I can actually, I do have a conflict, but this one I can switch.
[Andre Leroux]: Great, so I think we're open to a motion to adjourn. Is there such a motion?
[Claes Andreasen]: I won't make that motion.
[Andre Leroux]: Why, thank you, Clayce. Is there a second?
[Adam Hurtubise]: I'll second. This is Christy, I'll second.
[Andre Leroux]: Oh, let's take Christy. I saw Christy with her broad smile, so I'll take Christy on that one. All right, roll call vote. Clayce and Dresden. Aye. David Blumberg. Aye. Christy Dowd.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Aye.
[Andre Leroux]: Anna Peabody.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Aye.
[Andre Leroux]: Jackie Furtado.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Aye.
[Andre Leroux]: And I'm an aye as well. We're adjourned. Thank you everybody for your patience. Another long meeting, but hopefully the next one will be shorter.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Okay. Good night.