AI-generated transcript of Community Development Board 01-18-23

[David Blumberg]: Thank you very much. Welcome to tonight's meeting of the Medford Community Development Board, January 18 2023. I'll start with some obligatory messages for everyone. So please bear with me. This hearing of the Medford Community Development Board is being conducted via remote means, no in person attendance of members of the public will be permitted but every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings as provided for in Chapter 107 of the acts of 2022. A reminder that anyone who would like to listen to or view this meeting while in progress. We do so by accessing the link that was included on the meeting agenda posted on the city of Medford website. If despite our best efforts were unable to provide real time access will post a recording of this meeting on the city's website as soon as possible. A reminder that given the remote nature of this meeting tonight all votes from the board will be made by roll call. Excuse me. Please know that all project materials for this meeting and all of our meetings can be found on the city's website. easiest way to access that sort of information is to go to the main page, click on boards and commissions, find your way to Community Development Board among the boards listed alphabetically, click through and you'll see what we have before us for any given meeting. We start our meeting with a roll call of board members to see who's here this evening. My name is Dave Bloomberg and again welcome to the meeting. Vice Chair Jackie Furtado.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: Present.

[David Blumberg]: Yeah. Here. Christy doubt.

[Unidentified]: Yeah.

[David Blumberg]: And George Fisher present. Excellent. First item. Oh, I should say as well while we're going through names and faces. Amanda city staff perhaps you could mention for us, those who are in attendance this evening.

[Amanda Centrella]: Sure. So myself, Amanda Centrella, Planner in the Office of Planning Development and Sustainability. Director of Planning Development and Sustainability, Alicia Hunt, is also on the call. And I believe possibly joining us later will be Danielle Evans, who is newly recognized as our Senior Planner in the office.

[David Blumberg]: Excellent. Thank you, Amanda. A couple items on for this evening the first and an important one citywide for all of us is the comprehensive plan presentation from the group that has put that plan together over so many months and through so much effort on our behalf and presentation from them and then we'll have some discussion and perhaps a vote to adopt the plan on the city's behalf. So I'll turn it over to the presenters, including some friendly faces.

[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much. Good evening, everyone. We're excited to share the plan, the revised plan that has had a lot of feedback and revisions to date shared with you. Just wanted to see if Alicia or Amanda want to say anything before we jump in.

[Unidentified]: Thank you very much.

[Alicia Hunt]: I just wanted to thank everybody for all the hard work on the plan. There's been a very engaged, uh, group advisory group that's been involved in this. I see some of the members here this evening. Um, actually, Councilors Caraviello and Councilor Bears, who both joined us this evening, were on the advisory board, um, as well as, um, some of the others, um, Tom Lincoln, Bonnie, Rick Orlando, I'm seeing, I hope I didn't forget anybody that I'm actually seeing here in the room this evening, the virtual room. But it's been a lot of work and we've gotten a lot of input as I'm sure the consultants will be sharing with us.

[Unidentified]: And I just wanted to thank everybody for their hard work on this. Great, thank you. So we'll go ahead and dive in.

[SPEAKER_03]: Annie, who I understand is familiar to you all, is going to share the screen, and you'll hear from myself, Brie Hensel, that agency, Annie, who also reached us and joined us from a circuitous planning route, and Emily Innes with Innes Associates. So you'll hear from each of us to share parts and pieces of the plan.

[Nicole Morell]: And nice to see you all, and nice to be back.

[David Blumberg]: Welcome.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like I said, thank you so much for having us. We know this is a really important plan for the city, and also we hope it will be a useful tool for you all in the years to come as well. We hope tonight to share some updates that have changed to the plan, thanks to a lot of community feedback, staff pouring over the plan, feedback from boards and commissions and city council that have led to some updates since we last met with you in July, I believe. I'll just echo Alicia's huge thank you to the steering committee who was really fun to work with, fun, passionate, passionate for Medford, passionate for the plan, really had lots of great ideas about every kind of nook and cranny and different facet that we talked about. So they really helped to create and co-create this plan. And I think we captured everyone. It's nice to see the faces in the room from the steering committee. Again, it's been a while. And I just wanted to mention also Jackie Furtado, who I saw, who I know wears so many hats, but was always with us, really thoughtful in the steering committee too. The team beyond me included a few other planners from Agency Landscape and Planning, a data visualization and community engagement specialist who helped us get over a thousand comments on an online map, as well as created some informational videos, Chris Landau, We had local transportation planners from Arab, and then we also had CARP strategies diving into economic development and housing. So this was kind of really a comprehensive team to think about the different pieces of the plan. We've been working on this with you and with the steering committee since about spring of 2021 guided by a lot of community engagement along the way, a lot of fun workshops with the steering committee, and then just about the time that we saw you in July is when we were releasing for public input. the first draft of the plan itself. And so that was shared with the steering committee, with the community, and with a lot of workshops internally. Over the last about six months, we've been receiving those comments, making sure that there's a lot of ample time for feedback and review and re-review. And so we've now revised that draft. We'll show you some of the changes, kind of walk through that, and then walk through the shape of the plan. I'll talk a little bit about what this comprehensive plan is meant to do, why it's happening in the first place. It's guided and directed by Massachusetts General Laws, and it's governed by Chapter 41, Section 81D, which generally says that the plan will address the nine different elements, which include the different topical areas that you see at the bottom, everything from land use to history to mobility, and also make sure that the plan has goals, makes policy statements, and lays out an implementation plan so that these ideas can be achieved and incorporated to city practices. It's meant to be high level because of its comprehensive nature, and it's meant to be implemented through other studies that drill down or through kind of internal initiatives. So it's meant to be this vision that ties together a lot of community feedback into a cohesive shared picture of the future. Ultimately, the idea is that the plan will lay out a 10 year action plan. So as we get into the implementation plan, you'll start to see really tangible ideas, really tangible actions that hopefully will be accomplished and kind of taken on as initiatives in the coming years. But then it also looks at this 30 year planning horizon when it defines the vision goal statements for what Medford wants to be in the future. It's going to set out policies that will give direction to city departments, talks about investment. So thinking about capital investment, capital improvements, where to spend operating funds. One of the things that we heard a lot about was Yes, this plan is full of great ideas, but who's going to do it? We need staff and resources. And so that's something we've thought a lot about on the implementation side. We'll share some more of that. But it really thinks about needed staff, needed investment and partnerships. It sets you up for regulatory changes that can make some of this possible. And it's meant also to make a pathway for ongoing community discussions. There were a lot of great conversations that started in this process that we hope will carry forward. So since we last saw you in July, what has been happening we've had about over 600 comments on the draft plan and total a really deep dive from city staff, which was. really helpful, the folks who are going to implement this, who know kind of on the ground, how pieces will come together, what's possible, what's feasible, where ambitions should be higher or adjusted. We got over 400 from city staff. We got 125 comments from residents, almost 100 unique online views. So really great that people were engaging with the plan, giving feedback, and we've gone line by line through all of those different different points of feedback. This team, Alicia and Amanda and her team really considered everyone and tried to address them in the plan. So we'll show you a few of the bigger picture changes. One thing that shifted with some of the feedback was actually the order of the chapters. We started before always with opening and engaged communication, which really felt like this sort of overarching picture. And we've now moved up from the end to second, welcoming and supportive neighborhoods, because that was really such a resounding idea that came through from community engagement, as well as feedback. We wanted to make sure it was front and center, what people see when they first open the plan. We also have made some changes for usability so are highlighting kind of the topical areas and functional areas, as we go through the different goals and actions you can understand this might affect housing in the city this might affect. economic development, it might affect history. And that's not only meant to kind of organize things, but also to be call outs to advocacy groups or partners or passionate volunteers about open space. You can kind of quickly at a glance, figure out which recommendations align with what you're working on. We introduced a section up front to orient people to the different areas within Medford that we refer to a lot. So we're calling this places, References to places and areas. It's meant to kind of make sure people know geographically. What are we saying when we say hillside? Where are we talking about? So make sure just everyone has kind of a level understanding of how the city is knit together by these different neighborhoods. And then on the kind of meatier content side, as we got into the implementation chapter, that's probably changed and grown quite a bit from what you saw before. got a lot of really good feedback about the implementation chapter and kind of what was needed to set up the city for success. And the chapter now really emphasizes the need for investment in staff and administrative resources, whether those human resources or space. to support implementation. It also digs into the relationship and the strategy between having a relationship between economic development, infrastructure investments, and generating more tax revenue so you can make all of this happen.

[Unidentified]: Should I keep going? I'll keep going.

[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you. Yes. And then finally, it identifies priority actions and first steps. So where do we start, including some recommendations for zoning, how might you attack kind of thinking about different zoning changes, and then future land use actions. So as we get further into the presentation, Emily is gonna dive into the implementation chapter and share that with you too. What didn't change is that the plan is still really driven by all the feedback that we received, not just in the last six months, but in the whole kind of 18 months of the plan itself. So all of the in-person engagement, website and digital engagement and the focus groups. So really grateful for all of that direction. What that did was it set us up to understand patterns of city values and needs. You can see we heard about special places, a lot of those on the river, some issues, many of those on roads, and then ideas, many of those in Medford Square, but really in all the neighborhoods across the city. And we got to brainstorm some of these place-based improvements and understand how the policies The capital improvements, the ideas in here will make a difference on the ground in the experience of the city for residents in years to come. So ultimately what we'll show you now, we'll walk through these five plan themes that were shaped by that community feedback, open and engaged communication, a welcoming and supportive community, vibrant places, access for all and climate resiliency.

[Unidentified]: Those are really the pillars of the plan, and they also shape that long-term, like we said, 30-year vision. And with that, I'll pass it back to our friend and yours, Annie. Great.

[Nicole Morell]: Thanks, Brie. So before we get into kind of the five themes, we wanted to take a bit of a step back and I'll move pretty quickly through this since there's a lot of overlap with what we shared with you all last summer and also since you've been sitting with the plan. but thinking about the fact that Medford has done a lot of planning work at different levels and on different topics. And so part of the role of this plan is to really bring together current and past plans and to understand how these components relate holistically to one another. And so we looked at the history of land use and development in Medford and considered that together with current trends and citywide patterns. And then projecting that out to the future. And so this is sort of, the future land use map is this diagrammatic way of thinking about the different areas in Medford and the strategies this plan has for addressing those areas. So here you can see some highlighted elements such as the green corridor along the rivers, gateway entries to the city shown there in blue, civic and institutional anchors, those centers and squares of economic activity, and then also kind of smaller, more village centers at the neighborhood scale. And so thinking about how all these different areas of investment and a different character relate to one another and what they look like in the future. And so, as Brie mentioned, the five building blocks really came out of community engagement and input, and all of these were themes that were refined over the course of this process. And these were open and engaged communication, welcoming and supportive neighborhoods, vibrant places, access for all, and climate resiliency. So we'll dig into those just a little bit to provide a high level overview of what these look like, but there are many more actions and elements within the chapters themselves. So I encourage everyone to take a closer look and looking forward to discussion with you all after this. So first, open and engaged communication, and this includes the relationship between the community and City Hall, how plans like these get implemented over time, allocation of funding, and how the City relates to other potential partners who can help to implement elements of this plan. So some of the goals that came out here were to grow and strengthen community trust, to implement the plan according to community-supported priorities, and also allocating resources effectively to make sure that this plan can be effective going forward. And so just to highlight a few of the actions that are contained in this chapter, the plan recommends issuing an annual comprehensive plan update that will show progress made on the plan and really create that transparency with the community about actions that have been taken. Offering communication and training to residents and staff, including mediation training and thinking about how we're communicating with the rest of the community, tracking participation demographics in planning processes and on boards to really see who's in the room and how we can expand the reach of both membership of boards and commissions, but also of who's engaged in public processes. And then also identifying partners who can help to implement this plan. There are a lot of actions and recommendations and steps in here. So how can the city now do this alone and thinking about how to strategically allocate some of these steps to some supporting organizations and partners. So the second building block or theme is a welcoming and supportive community. And so, One of the big goals here is ensuring affordable housing for all and housing was a big theme that came forth throughout the engagement process. As Brie mentioned, part of moving this chapter up in the structure of the plan was really to emphasize kind of the weight of that piece within the plan and the emphasis on that. And this plan builds a lot on the housing production plan that was recently completed, but really emphasizing that the affordable housing goal is a main component of this plan. Another goal within this theme is enlivening open spaces and facilities and really having those Medford's abundant open space, really leveraging that and making it be the most welcoming and supportive and engaging places that they can be. And then also honoring Medford's rich history, roots and culture that are really present throughout the neighborhoods and how we can bring those to the forefront and think about how to leverage those resources. And so highlighting a few examples of actions here, diversifying housing options by allowing multifamily and small diverse housing options through zoning changes, retrofitting existing facilities for universal accessibility, and beautifying centers by working with local artists to highlight history and culture. So kind of that mix of addressing affordability and open space and

[Unidentified]: and history and arts and culture. And then the third theme or building block is cyberplaces.

[Nicole Morell]: And this relates to economic development and land use and open space and how these work together to kind of create a more vibrant and active community. And a few goals here were something that was heard a lot in engagement was about creating these live and work communities in Bedford and sort of the 12 and 18 hour communities. So having something to do and extending the hours of when these resources are available and activities happening in centers. Also supporting businesses and the workforce. So through workforce training and making sure that economic development growth in Medford supports Medford residents and the members of the community are prepared with the skills and resources for that growth. And then increasing the enjoyment of natural resources, also within this by replacement element and balancing growth. So really seeing you know, the areas that are appropriate for growth and how to balance that with investment in infrastructure and transportation to really make sure that the investments needed are in place to support that growth.

[Unidentified]: So a few actions here that we'll highlight are

[Nicole Morell]: Leveraging city-owned parcels to develop and promote multi-family residential. Attracting companies that will provide well-being jobs to residents in Bedford. And encouraging that small-scale neighborhood retail and services to provide services within neighborhoods and those walkable communities. So then the fourth theme or building block here is access for all. And this relates to mobility and facilities and services and how people get around the community. And so the goals here relate to connecting multi-mobile networks and building on recent investments that have been made and really creating the connections between where people want to go in Medford. As I mentioned a bit with Fiber Police is to coordinating that mobility and development so that where growth is happening, there is the transportation infrastructure to support it. And then improving the mobility experience for all users. So from pedestrians and bikers to transit users and universal accessibility, really making sure that experience is improved for everyone. So a couple of actions that I'll highlight here are auditing pedestrian crossings and school adjacent routes for safe crossings. working with the ongoing bicycle master plan update to really create a safe and well-connected network for all users, promoting density and mixed use and walking distance of MBTA train stations and major bus hubs, and then also determining how to integrate currently unaccepted streets into the city ownership, since that was a topic that came up a lot in engagement. And then finally, and we sort of move this to the end, not because it's not important, but because it's sort of looking ahead to the future. And also it's building on so much work that the city is already doing with the climate action and adaptation plan. And so climate resilience goals within the plan include raising community awareness about the impacts of climate change. really achieving and evolving the climate action and adaptation plan so that it's time to support implementation of that plan. Preserving and enhancing my current existing natural resources to really leverage those existing assets, and then supporting community health and resilience. So really trying to create the resources necessary to support the Metric community and in particular, environmental justice communities or communities who are at greater risk of negative impacts and climate change. And so a few key examples here of actions to highlight are using streets and open spaces for stormwater management, focusing public tree investments in priority areas like places of high heat vulnerability, adopting environmental performance standards for large projects, and updating flood resilience and cool surface design guidelines and standards. So with that, I will turn it over to Emily to talk about our implementation section.

[Emily Innes]: Thank you very much, Annie, and can you all hear me? Perfect. So, as you can see there are a lot of wonderful ideas that came out of the public process. And we've also brought in best practices as we tried to bring the ideas together and figure out ways of categorizing them I think Annie took you through. both the, the breakdown of the goals and what we're looking to do based on the comments, but also how some of them apply to the city throughout that's the geographic basis, the implementation plan is a little bit different and if you'll slip to the next slide. This is really figuring out how do you take all these ideas, how do you put them into a framework, not just the themes that Annie went through, but in the form of a plan that the CDB, that the city council, the mayor, other people, other groups, other departments can bring forward and start to implement. The beginning of the implementation section is these high level categories of how do you get the people and the other resources together that can do implementation. And then how do you think of prioritization obviously from the city's point of view. One idea is the how economic development aligns throughout because economic development has such an impact on everything else that can happen in the plan. But from your point of view, the idea of land use and zoning changes and they're scattered throughout the document, but the implementation plan brings them together and we'll talk about those a little bit as we move forward. And then from there, every comprehensive plan will also because of the level of comprehensive plan is at. it will identify additional studies that need to be done. And the important thing about those additional studies is how do we think about continuing to engage the people who have been engaged with the process so far, right? This plan set a standard and actually in this case, this plan followed along from work that the city had already begun to do And really built on that future studies will continue to build and improve the community engagement. So let's jump into a little bit more detail about the implementation plan and we're going to start off with the zoning strategies. One key piece as we heard input back from the first draft is, we need to know more about prioritization and so in the implementation plan. We've set it up so that you can see how to really begin thinking about zoning changes from the step of you've completed your recodification as with any recodification there's always some minor tweaks coming out. You're working right now on bringing your, your zoning map from having been a mile hour into a digital format, which has been ongoing and really refining that and bringing that forward. And so with those updates, it's time to think about the next steps. So one thing that we've recommended in talking with city staff is the idea that as zoning changes are made, bringing forward policy statements that explain why the zoning change was made. What was it that the city was trying to accomplish with that? And that idea of thinking about policies and zoning fits very neatly with the next couple of recommendations. One is to really develop a research-based practice of looking what other communities have done in terms of best practices to address zoning changes and zoning change processes, how do you bring the public along, get their input, do something that zoning changes that reflect the values of the community as well as the needs of the city, those should really be combined and so there's best practices around that. And then there's a set of priorities for the next steps in looking at the different neighborhoods and areas that were identified as important during this plan. And so we've suggested a topical way of looking at that you can see that on the left hand side, different topics that are threaded throughout this document that could be addressed by zoning changes. And we've also suggested a way of prioritizing them by geography so that's the specific neighborhoods quarters squares that needed additional attention. If you think of the comprehensive plan is sort of up here, now we need to get down to the level of those neighborhoods and centers. So that prioritization for zoning really looks at what can happen quickly, and what needs to happen going forward. Next slide, Annie. So another component, and this is coming out more and more in community planning processes is before when you did, you know, the earlier stages of an implementation was you just listed the action, and then it became no you need to do the action, the partners, the timeline and we're going to talk about how this implementation plan does all of those. But now best practices for community planning is really about establishing benchmarks for measuring the success of the plan. So, in this case, the idea of getting the relevant departments together and understanding what are their goals, what are the goals for different city boards and committees, And then how do you measure that those goals or those actions have been successfully implemented? So we've given an example here of how you might do that for neighborhoods that are more welcoming and supportive. How do you know that you've done that? Well, we see an increase in certain trends, right? They may be housing units, historic designations, we see an increase in diversity, we see an increase in children who live within a 10 minute walk of a playground. We see a decrease in the percentage of population that is housing cost burden. So it's the idea of figuring out initially, what are the trends that spell success, and then for some things, As you go forward with implementing the plan you may want to establish specific metrics you may want to say, it's not enough that our housing units are increasing we want to increase our housing units by this amount or affordable housing units by this amount and that's really a department by department conversation. And so another way of doing that is what was the impact of the work that we as a city are doing? And so here's an example, you can see by the colored dots here of a way of thinking about how you can take a single area and measure the impact of the plan by seeing how many of the goals have actually been applied to the area, right? So if all of these things have been completed or a portion of these things have been completed, then you know that you're really addressing the needs of that particular area of Medford. And so the plan breaks these down as ways to think about the fact that you're making progress. Next slide, please, Annie. So there's two sections that I want to sort of call your attention to. And we've got two ways of reading these sections. The first is the objectives and actions. And Annie hit those at a very high level. So you can see how they work through thematically. What you'll do when you go to the plan itself is you'll see how these are broken down. So you see the goal, you see the supporting goal, the sub goal underneath. the objection for that goal, and then the specific actions. And so these are laid out so you can see the real details behind why these goals are important and how each of the actions or the objectives support those goals. And then in this case, certainly on this page and many others, there are quotes from the community engagement that are directly associated with these goals. And then if you go to the next slide, please, So that's great, we've got those listings, those came out. This is where we get into the components I mentioned earlier, that idea of who's doing this, you know, how did they get started, how do we track progress, and where do we go for funding. And so, if you go to the next slide. The next piece is this table. And again, we've used this slide to show how to read the table, but basically it'll show you the goal. It'll show you the actions, who the partners are. Many of them are city departments, which is where we get back to that idea of, do we have the right amount of staff? Do the staff have the right resources to do what they need to do to achieve these goals? Some of them are boards, committees. And then some of the partners are not, in fact, city groups. So you may have a city steward, the lead department or the lead position for an action. And then partners may be other city departments, but they may also be institutions or nonprofits or other people who have a vested interest in the success of that action being completed or expertise in that particular task. So for example, some of the arts-based organizations may be partners for some of the arts based actions. And then we have a list of projects that the city is working on now, you don't plan in a vacuum. And so this gives an idea of what's been done to date, and it helps with what should be the next steps. The next slide please. So that's an overview of implementation. This idea that the beginning of the section lays out some of the priorities, especially for this board. I mean, the comprehensive plan is a planning document for the CDB, as well as for the city. So it gives you some ideas, particularly on the zoning and the land use, but also on other components and how they work together. You see how the tables work for identifying all of the actions. And now it's really a chance for us to say, thank you. both to the CDB obviously for working with us and for all of the many people, the steering committee, all of the people who took time out to provide comments. Under section 81D, the CDB is the city's planning board, of course, and it is responsible for adopting the plan. So we'd love to talk to you, you know, any questions or discussion you'd like to have on this tonight. And then just next slide quickly, Annie. Oh, did we want to do this now? I wasn't sure if you'd have the link in time.

[Nicole Morell]: It is. The only thing that's remaining to be swapped is that order of the chapters and the graphic of the implementation table. So Alicia, we might leave it up to you. If you think the video is final, it just needs that replacement swap out of the implementation page. And that should happen any day now. We just have it here in case it would be helpful and we can sort of share it around after the fact as well once we have that updated literacy.

[Alicia Hunt]: I think it would be fun to show it. It's like two minutes. Yeah.

[David Blumberg]: I think everyone enjoys a good video.

[Emily Innes]: And I should say this is from our incredibly talented partner, Landau Designs, who has been working with us on all of the community engagement, the earlier videos that we had, the map that drew so many comments. So with the board's permission, I think we'd love to show it.

[David Blumberg]: Let's do it.

[Emily Innes]: And a guest voice.

[Unidentified]: A familiar guest voice, yes.

[Emily Innes]: And then I'll turn it to you after the video to finish up.

[SPEAKER_03]: Sounds good. I think Annie is just getting the audio set up so audio can share as well.

[Unidentified]: Yes.

[Emily Innes]: So while Annie's doing that, I'll just say that the next steps is this, just because the document is finished, doesn't mean that the work is done from the CD board's perspective. Obviously you have the right to, or the obligation to review, and if you're happy with it, to adopt the plan, but it still needs support from everyone who's been involved with the process so far to do the implementation work. So there is plenty of time for community comment and participation and engagement.

[Nicole Morell]: Can you hear the sound? I believe I'm sharing now. Yes. Good job.

[Denis MacDougall]: Medford's comprehensive plan is here, and it will act as a roadmap to guide policies and investments over the next 10 to 30 years. It will help the city plan for future development, adapt to climate change, make it easier to move around, support historic and cultural places, align public services with resident needs, and more. It sets a clear framework with greater predictability and consistency for residents, businesses, city staff, and developers. The plan is structured around five overarching themes that we heard from you. Each chapter of the plan identifies goals, objectives, and actions to support aspirations for the city's future that are easy to measure so that the city can track the plan's progress. Here are a few examples. Identify partners who can help to implement plan recommendations. Provide communication training to residents and staff. Adopt policies for new development to help with climate mitigation. Plant new trees in priority areas with lower income levels or heat islands. Make it easier to walk and bike in Medford by filling gaps in existing networks. Add solar arrays or other sustainability features to commercial center parking. Rezone emerging corridors, such as Mystic Avenue and Mystic Valley Parkway. Encourage companies that provide well-paying jobs to residents to locate in Medford. Work with partners to maintain and grow a range of housing types, focusing on housing affordability. Build and strengthen community connections through neighborhood block parties and citywide celebrations. For more examples, take a look at the full plan. The comprehensive plan is a guiding document. It will inform future zoning changes and capital projects, but it doesn't directly change any city ordinances or assign funding today. Future processes will develop budgets, design capital projects, or revise the city zone. Ultimately, the plan serves as a guide to reach a vision for Medford that by 2050, Medford's many welcoming communities thrive among vibrant places that enhance the daily lives of all who work, play, learn, and grow in our city. Together, we share a future that is protected from extreme heat and flooding, connects people to where they need to go, and promotes open, engaged communication. The plan is the result of extensive engagement from you, the Medford community. Over the past year and a half, you've been sharing your ideas with us, your concerns, the places that are special to you, and your vision for the future of your community. Thank you. Your role doesn't end here. Engagement will be ongoing as the plan is implemented. Visit www.medfordcompplan.org to read the full plan and to stay informed about upcoming opportunities to shape your community. have questions or comments, email compplan at medford-ma.gov.

[SPEAKER_03]: So hopefully we've got a couple edits to make to that, as Annie said, just to make it align with all the revisions. And then we hope you'll help us share it around and kind of excessively spread the news about the plan.

[David Blumberg]: That's wonderful. Thank you very much for the presentation tonight and obviously all of the work you've done it's amazingly impressive to think of the amount of effort that both, or all of the folks involved have put into this the team of consultants advising the city, all the city staff, and maybe most impressive the number of residents who are active participants in this process over a very long period of time. And so to me, I think that's worthy of congratulations for everyone who's involved in a very impressive feat. I thought maybe it would be most appropriate for us to invite any of the members of the steering committee, not that they have to speak tonight, but if there's anyone who's motivated to talk about their experience or their feelings, this would be a great opportunity to hear from each and every one of you who'd like to weigh in tonight. Amanda, can you, I'm not sure I'm seeing everyone's hand.

[Amanda Centrella]: Yeah, yes. So I'm happy to have folks, if they, especially from the steering committee, if they want to speak, raise your hand. I see Councilor Rick Caraviello. So I'm going to ask you to unmute.

[Richard Caraviello]: First of all, thank you, everybody, for all the work we've done over the months of this. So, you know, it was a lot of time put in. and a lot of work went in. I just have a couple of things here. There's no talk about implementation of the plan yet. So I'd like to see how we're gonna implement the plan. And then I think at some point, I've said this from day one, we've gotten a lot of community input, but I think it's time now that we start bringing the stakeholders in the community that own the property and everything uh, into the conversation, uh, because again, we know we, everyone can have all the great ideas they want. If the stakeholders don't buy into our project, then we've done all this work for naught. So I think, I would hope, I would hope that, um, we could, uh, invite, invite stakeholders in and, and figure out how to implement the plan that we spent so much time on doing. Thank you.

[David Blumberg]: Excellent. Thank you for that input. And, um, it is a good reminder as much effort went into getting us to this point, I feel like there's a lot more ahead. And this is only the beginning of the work that's ahead of the boards and residents and city government so thank you for that input do we have others who would like to provide us.

[Amanda Centrella]: Yes. Tom Lincoln from the steering committee.

[David Blumberg]: Excellent. Mr. Lincoln, how are you.

[Adam Hurtubise]: No video.

[Amanda Centrella]: Oh, I'm sorry. We've disabled video for the time being just to dissuade any bad behavior.

[Alicia Hunt]: She means from the Zoom bombers. Yes. Not from you. Not from anyone. We should have made that clear. We had to eject a couple of Zoom bombers.

[Tom Lincoln]: Yeah. Okay. But it's still not on here.

[Unidentified]: We would have to turn it on for everybody. Yes.

[Adam Hurtubise]: So what am I going to do?

[Unidentified]: You can talk. We don't.

[Tom Lincoln]: Oh, I can talk. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

[Unidentified]: Yes.

[Tom Lincoln]: Sorry. Forgive me. Tom Lincoln. I usually looking at my ugly mug here. I think this is terrific. A lot of work went has gone into this. I think the key, of course, is, as everybody said, is the implementation. And I understand there'll be, you know, a number of steps taken along those lines. I just had a couple of fairly specific comments. I'm not sure that's exactly the right time to do it, but I did do the trouble of making a little bit of a list here. Alicia's used to my list. I think for the good of all, so to speak, and the good of the plan, I think it'd be really critical to get a couple of things done in a short period. There are 181 items in the implementation section, which is really staggering. And they're certainly not all on the same level. But I think that, and I suggested this to Amanda in an email yesterday or today, you know, maybe picking up, I'm just making up a number here, picking a small number here and doing it because there are a number of things here that really aren't gonna cost any money that would really show some forward progress. Sorry, it's my phone, it only goes off when I'm talking. I also wanted to emphasize that the, I'm going to throw this phone out the window here. Thousands of spam phone calls. I think another point that I've made before, and I'm not sure it's reflected here, is I think the city and the planners obviously need to be aware of broader trends. For example, there's a lot of talk here about retail and increasing retail. I'm no expert on it, but I'm not sure that bricks and mortar retail is a sector that's going to be prospering in the next 10 years in the American economy. I just was talking to somebody today, was commenting on the number of vacant buildings in our little square here in West Medford. So that's a comment. The trees, the tree canopy, the idea of a no net loss tree ordinance, I think that came out very strongly in terms of public engagement and public interest. And I think it would be really good to move ahead on that. I think we're kind of falling behind, frankly, on the tree front in Medford, both in terms of the canopy and street trees, et cetera. The last thing I would mention, I think that's critical here as a design review board, this failed politically at least once in my lifetime, in the last 15 years. But I think that there's a lot of sentiment in Medford that development is not well controlled and certainly not aesthetically controlled. We talk endlessly in Medford about our historic neighborhoods, et cetera, but we're losing an awful lot of historic fabric. I'm not saying it's all worth saving, but once it's gone, it's gone forever. The last thing that there is mentioned on page 41 about an implementation committee. I'm not sure what this is, but I think if you want, as I assume you do, if you want to ensure long-term engagement of residents, that this may be a vehicle you might want to put into effect soon. But as one person on the steering committee and somebody who has way too many opinions, as everybody knows, I'm delighted that this has made this much progress. I'm very hopeful that it will move forward to benefit both the people of Medford, to benefit our economy, benefit the environment, and make us a stronger and even more wonderful place. Thanks very much.

[David Blumberg]: Thank you, Tom thanks for weighing in and thank you as always for your engagement with the city and how much you care about that for understand that recognize it so Amanda, I see Councilor Bears with a hand up maybe among others but yes, I'm asking to unmute now.

[Zac Bears]: Great, thank you so much, Amanda and I'll be short and sweet because I think what I was going to say has been said but Number one, just thankful to everyone who's participated in the process and the staff and all of the consultants who've helped us come to this point. I think we can all agree that having a comprehensive plan is long overdue and bringing together all of the work of so many folks, you know, not just over the past year and a half, but also the past, you know, decade or two where we've had plans that didn't go anywhere, but have now maybe had some new life breathed into them by I think, um. Pulling them all together in one place, I think is a good thing. Um but I totally agree that now as as we're looking forward, this plan is designed to help us look forward. And the real question to me is the pace of change, you know, and the pace of action and I think you know, being honest about the level of resources and funding that's going to be necessary to take advantage of the great opportunities that this plan presents. Um it's going to be really

[David Blumberg]: Thank you very much. As the bears, Amanda Do we have other participants, other members of the public who would like to weigh in I was going to go to the board I let us go last if that's okay.

[SPEAKER_03]: Oh sorry. Go ahead. Amanda Thank you. I was just going to thank everyone for the comments so far, Tom and Councilor para bellow. and Councilor Bears, who have all given, we know have read the plan really closely and given it lots of careful thought. So I just wanted to thank them and for the focus on implementation, which has really, I think, been the focus of the team for the last six months with the guidance of this group and others. And I hope, too, with some of Tom's good ideas around low-hanging fruit and kind of implementing some things early, Alicia's team has done a great job looking at what's happening now and kind of what's possible to make happen now and kind of lining up the plan with ongoing initiatives and initiatives that are starting. So hopefully there'll be able to be some, some of that demonstrated early action, which is a great idea. Thank you.

[David Blumberg]: Excellent. Thank you. I see my neighbor, Rick Orlando with his hand up.

[Unidentified]: Hello, neighbor.

[Richard Orlando]: I'd like to thank everybody, both those involved from the city and the consultant work and the citizens of the city. I would just like to, we hear discussions or questions on implementation frequently. Implementation will touch pretty much all of the elements of the plan, the core areas. I think though, in many cases, the public, particularly the public that may not have been as active or involved in this. When they hear that word, they're thinking about development in terms of economic development, downtown development, amenities, buildings, shovels in the ground, that type of thing. That's done in an intelligent way for the respective areas that development will go on. So I think I just want to distinguish what I think a lot of people are actually inquiring about when they ask about implementation. And the last thing I would just echo what Tom said about as we move towards that development, having design guidelines. So we ended up coming up with something that is attractive and acceptable and well-received by the community. Thank you.

[David Blumberg]: Thank you very much, Rick, for your input and your involvement as always. Amanda, can I go to the board now or do we have some other members of the steering committee or public who'd like to weigh in.

[Amanda Centrella]: Looks like nobody else has raised their hand or chatted me so yeah, feel free.

[David Blumberg]: Vice Chair potato. How are you this evening.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: Thank you. I'm pretty good. I am I actually did raise my hand as a steering committee member I wanted to. I'm sorry, I don't know if I did it properly here. I wanted to just make a quick comment before I got into the board discussions. And again, just echoing everyone and thanking everyone that took part in this and just first and foremost, congratulations to the city of Medford for getting the ball moving to create and implement this comprehensive plan, right? It expresses the community's values, goals, preferences that align with regulatory requirements as in what we can legally and feasibly be done. And, um, it's represents a healthy, a stealthy collaboration of various community members. And I'm just honored for the opportunity to take part in this inception, including the strategies that we will decide on and figure out to move it forward. Um, so I just wanted to just put that out there from the steering committee as a resident, and then I'll circle back as a board member.

[David Blumberg]: Excellent. Thank you, Jackie.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: Thank you.

[David Blumberg]: All right, Amanda, should we give it right back to Jackie then she could kick off our board discussion of the comp plan. Excellent. Jackie if you don't mind taking the honors. Now we're in a different hat.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: Now we're in a different hat. a couple of concerns have not so much concerns, but real life action and how we're going to move the action plans forward. One of the questions I had was there was a lot of moving pieces in the implementation section of it, and it's just a matter of having more in-depth conversations with the community, with the city staff, and how we're going to get this out to the community and continued engagement of making sure that it's implemented in a way that actually was captured in the spirit in which it was captured. So, and that includes the very real and uncomfortable conversations with elected officials on funding and just making it a huge priority. And so it's really not a question that I have it's just more of a statement that I want to put out there and, and, and I, I have no doubt that this plan could be done, but we really need to. We really did the same energy that was used to make the plan needs to continue and its implementation.

[David Blumberg]: Thank you, Jackie. Other board members with feelings on the plan before us today. I guess just following up on Jackie's thought is that really the first thing that needs to happen is, what is the identifying the first step is it an implementation committee is for various boards and city departments to each identify what their individual first step is in implementation, I'm not sure what, what the answer is to that.

[Emily Innes]: If I may, Mr. Chair, I'd love to throw in a couple of thoughts on the implementation. Excellent. Thank you heard for a few people. So, the implementation committee, I think, Tom Lincoln mentioned it is certainly part of this, as is incidentally design review board. I'd say that's probably one of the first administrative steps to take in terms of organization, is to figure out how that committee should be set up, who should be on it, get them moving so that they can start to get familiar with the plan. One of the other comments was, you know, the physical changes that could come out of this, and that's certainly true. There are plenty of actions in here that would result in some sort of physical change, whether it's planting trees, taking care of open space, looking at development, looking at short-term improvement programs to a particular area versus long-term development. So thinking about what that low-hanging fruit is is important, but I also want to call out there are things in here that aren't necessarily physical changes. And so that's something that people should be aware of too, that some of the recommendations are about that communication, that bringing people together as Jackie mentioned, that idea that there needs to be a continuing process and back and forth between the city, the residents, the property owners, the business owners, all of the people who are involved with the community. So I wanted to call that out. And then finally, Jackie also mentioned financing and I didn't forget to say that in the implementation section there is a list of financial resources programs that can help the city. Do additional planning work with the state to do some infrastructure improvements so there's a whole list of appropriate funding sources. Many of them are grants that are competitive grants but the advantage of having a comprehensive plan is it makes you more competitive when you go after that. It allows the city to put a strong face forward saying we've done our planning, this is how we've engaged the community, this is what the priorities have been, this grant would help us get there. So that's a really important component of implementation to understand. But I think from the city's point of view, the entire city, getting that implementation committee up and running from your point of view, the CD board, I think looking at the zoning changes, the links to economic development there, and then understanding the grant cycles and programs and how those would work. And I'll stop now, because I see Alicia has her hand up as well.

[David Blumberg]: Please, Alicia, we'd love to hear from you.

[Alicia Hunt]: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, this is stuff that we've been thinking about a lot. Um, and we've been taking some sort of quiet steps in the background, as some of you are aware, we had, we've had a planner position that's gone on killed for quite a while, that was recently changed to a senior planner position. and Danielle was promoted into that position. And part of what she'll do is take on staffing of this board, but part of what was written into that job description was just to work with implementation of the comprehensive plan. And so some of these steps are things that Danielle will be starting to work with, as I will be as well, and everybody in the office. But part of what that makes this possible is that Amanda will then continue to work on a lot of the parks projects that she's been doing and bring more attention to those. And then Danielle was actually filling two roles, and we've posted both of those as full-time positions funded through the CPA and CDBG. So we're back filling Danielle's work if we can find some good candidates with two people, a housing planner and a CPA manager. And that should really free up her ability to spend some time on some of these. Additionally, I have to apologize. I cannot remember in which forums I've mentioned this. We have one additional position that we haven't posted yet, but we received a grant from the state for a climate zoning planner. And when we gave them not a description, but a scope of what that person would do, we basically listed all the climate and zoning items that are in the plan, the comprehensive plan and the climate plan. And we said, they're gonna work with the city council and legal and find best practices and help to bring these things forward and help move a bunch of this climate policy forward. much of which is in the comprehensive plan as well. So that's another position that we do expect it'll take us a little bit of time to fill, but that we will also be bringing those resources as well to the table, because a lot of this does take human capital and time. And some of these things are things in the implementation plan Each item, each action is given a project champion, which is a department or department head in the city, who is not necessarily going to personally do it, but would be responsible for moving that forward. And in that way we've distributed the work, because this is not one person, it's not one board, it's not even one office. There are things in there listed for the city engineer for the traffic department for the DPW for the mayor's office the comms department. There is for the health department. There's a lot there under us. And a lot of this is actually plans like just for developers for them to understand what is the city looking forward for. We were pleased to have one of our big property owners, Um, uh, from pre auto lane on the, um, advisory board for this as well as well as one at least one small business owner off the top of my head. So and we have reached out and talked with various property owners in the city. But part of this is a roadmap for them and developers to understand what is it that the city would like to see moving forward. And some of it does set the stage for us to know where do we do need to do a little bit more work. And where do we need to dig deeper. So we do recognize that but we're ready. We're ready and if you can help share our job descriptions out and help us find more qualified candidates to share this load with us, that would actually be amazing. So we thank you all this evening.

[David Blumberg]: Excellent. Thank you. Thank you very much. I guess one that I feel like is most relevant to us as a board is the set of zoning considerations that are presented. And we don't always have time to think about those and we only meet kind of these public forums and we do have provisions that we could meet as a subcommittee or we could set up subcommittees, maybe that's something that we need to think about, so that we can roll up our sleeves a little bit and take a look at some of the zoning recommendations and see how they might apply in the community. So that's just a thought that's occurring to me now so we're talking through this. Some of the zoning in the past has come from city councils and the zoning has come from, you know, Alicia's office because there have been certain developments or issues that have been raised. But I haven't seen that come from the board itself, maybe this is an opportunity for us to be a little more proactive in an area that is central to our core missions. All right. Any other comments we do have the opportunity tonight to vote to adopt the proposed comprehensive plan that's part of our role if we as a board are ready to do that. If there's not more discussion we could certainly move to that next step of the motion.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: chair Bloomberg. I just have one more comment I wanted to make. I would be remiss if I didn't say this. We thank everyone, including the city staff and all the residents and everyone. I want to just give a special thanks agency for in your partners for all that you did. I was also part of the selection process for that and you didn't disappoint. I just wanted, I just, I had to say that.

[David Blumberg]: Excellent.

[Alicia Hunt]: I just also want to just be explicitly clear. There are two things that are being edited the acknowledgements page, we're still finalizing we just want to make sure that everybody's listed the way they prefer to be listed on that. So we're finalizing the acknowledgements page. and we asked the mayor's office if they would write an introduction letter from the mayor. And I did tell them that we did not need that for this evening, because they're working, the mayor's giving a big state of the city next week, and I didn't want to try and compete with that. I'd rather it be them take the time to really give us a good letter.

[David Blumberg]: Thank you very much.

[Alicia Hunt]: My hope is that that wouldn't hold up your need to vote if you were so inclined to vote on it, though.

[David Blumberg]: That sounds fair. Anyone want to make a motion for approval of the comprehensive plan? Adoption, I think is the right word.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: Adoption, so moved, unless you would like me to repeat that.

[David Blumberg]: I'll second. All right. Call for a roll call vote then sure I have everyone vice chair, Jackie for title.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: Yes.

[David Blumberg]: Deanna Peabody. Yes. Yes. Christy doubt.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Yes.

[David Blumberg]: George, George Fisher. Yes. And I'm a yes as well. Thanks again to everyone who was involved, and thank you for everyone who participated this evening and congratulations to everyone.

[Unidentified]: Thank you. We appreciate your support on this big effort.

[Alicia Hunt]: It's been a big lift.

[David Blumberg]: Awesome. Good work, everyone. Okay, Amanda, we're ready to move on to item number two on our agenda. I see you nodding. Excellent. We have a presentation tonight. from Verdant Bio in connection with 243 Mystic Ave. This is an informal sort of preliminary presentation brought to us by the proponent team. And looking for who's taking the lead on behalf of the Verdant Bio tonight.

[Amanda Centrella]: If you could put it in the chat, who the lead presenter is and I'll unmute you and give you permissions.

[Unidentified]: All right, give me one second.

[Amanda Centrella]: Okay, so you should be all set to be able to share and unmute as needed.

[Doug Medvets]: Hi, everybody. Thanks for having us this evening. My name is Doug Medveds here. I'm one of the principals at Verdant Bio. I'm here with Matt Juros of CI Design. They are the lead architects on the project. Khadijah Hindi is here with me. She's another principal at Verdant. Our attorney, James Heffernan, is also on in case there's any questions that we can't answer along those lines. actually glad we were here tonight to hear all this. This was great. Very informative for us. I was completely unaware that we were going to get to listen to all that. So that was really fascinating. And hopefully we can we can help out with with some of the implementation. A little bit of background on Verdant.

[David Blumberg]: Well, if I could just interrupt and I'm sorry because I've given you the floor now I'm taking it back from you but I just wanted to make a note, both for your team, you and your team and also others who might be watching and participating that this is a preliminary presentation and we did a little bit of background for your benefit. We've done this a handful of times now, and we find, I think, as a board that it's very helpful for us and the proponents, I think, get a lot out of it. One cautionary note, which maybe goes without saying, but I'll say it because we did at one point have someone do a preliminary presentation with us. And, you know, we gave a lot of feedback and when they came back they were disappointed that we had more feedback than even we what we presented in our initial meeting so yeah, I just, I just with that understanding that this won't be the comprehensive full to do list of every comment that you're going to receive from the board will certainly do our best to be helpful and give you as much productive feedback as we can this evening, no doubt.

[Doug Medvets]: Definitely appreciate that and we completely understand where you're coming from, right? We present this, people are going to have comments tonight and then they're going to think about it, maybe look at it another day and then have some other feedback. Yeah, we have gone through a pretty lengthy community process in Chelsea already on a similar building, a bigger building, but similar ideas. So there was a lot of back and forth, and we did a lot of free application meetings prior to submitting our zoning application. And that's why I was so happy when Amanda suggested this, so that we could have this conversation and get to know each other. And so yes, please, we welcome any feedback, any concerns, comments, questions, whatever anybody on the call has, we are open to them. And again, a little bit of background on Verdant. So Khadijah and myself are the principals, and we've been doing development for about 10 years. We started in the residential world. And that came after many years in the lab. So we are both scientists by training. And so we transitioned into development for a variety of reasons. And over the last couple of years, some of our peers and colleagues who are still in the science world started talking to us and saying, it would be really nice if you started dipping in to the life science and biotech development because of our backgrounds and because of our understanding of of science and the lab and the functionality of how a lab should be run. And so we really approach development of life science from the scientist perspective, as opposed to just coming in and saying, hey, we want to build these massive buildings and put as many square feet as we can. The other benefit to having that sort of direct knowledge and connection to the science world is We are actively talking to companies in the biotech space and asking them, how should these buildings be run? And so we're looking at this building as what we're considering a bio incubator. It's not going to be necessarily one large tenant who takes up the entire building. It's going to be a mixture of smaller early stage companies who are very well funded, who are going to be taking, if you want to think of it almost as like a condo building, like a companies are gonna take small pieces of the building and do their research that way and grow into larger spaces. We think that that's where the vast majority of these companies are at this point. And so that's kind of the focus of this building overall. So yeah, I always like to let everybody know why we chose this particular location. We look at a lot of, I think Matt's gonna share the screen here. So I'll give him one second to pull that up. We do look at a lot of locations and I spend, can everybody see the... the slideshow here?

[Adam Hurtubise]: Okay.

[Doug Medvets]: So I do shop a lot at Wegmans. I do know this area quite well. And so when this location came to me through a real estate agent that I know, I was really excited. And so I wanted to share a little bit on why we think that. The main issue for us and scientists in perspective or in general is, Obviously, locations that are close to transportation, right? We want to be and most scientists would prefer not to drive if possible. And so we try to look for locations where obviously we're going to put some parking in the building because that's what a lot of cities require. But we want to find locations that have some walkability or the potential to have some sort of shuttle system. So just, I'm sure most of you are familiar with this, but here's the location, 243 Mystic Avenue. And then the architect team put these circles with a radius of about a two minute walk for the first circle and about a 10 minute walk for the second circle. Anything within that circle is obviously very walkable for a scientist. And so we wanted to highlight some of the transportation nodes that are around here as well as the the bus routes and bike stations as well. So all of these are really important aspects for an early stage biotech company. And so that's one of the really attractive parts of this location. Obviously, we have Wellington Station, we have Wegmans, we have Assembly Row, all very close here. There's apartment buildings right across the river. So there's also the, the the sort of young professional style apartments that are close and then obviously just to the to the west of our site we have a lot of residential neighborhoods right so there's everything that we need in this potential site to really build a nice building and bring in the young professionals to who are going to be working as the scientists in this lab so The other thing, too, is we do talk, as I mentioned, we talk to scientists and CEOs of these companies and we ask them what they think about these locations. And so we've got a lot of positive feedback around there. And then the last thing is. we do see a lot of potential for development in this area. And I think that was hit on very well with the comprehensive plan that was just described. There is, besides the fact that we think there's a lot of commercial and industrial sites along sort of Mystic Avenue here that could be primed for redevelopment, you obviously have Tufts, that's not very far away. And that will help drive new companies, right? We can collaborate with Tufts in a variety of ways, Universities like Tufts, who are actively producing biotech companies, those are things that are really attractive in building life science buildings. So just a little bit of feel for why we chose this site. So I'm actually going to turn it over to Matt at this point. Matt Jurows, he's the lead architect. He's going to go through sort of his vision on what makes sense for this building.

[Matthew Juros]: Okay, thanks Doug and thanks for taking some time with us this evening, the opportunity to have sort of a low stakes conversation. and sort of get your feedback as we continue developing the buildings. Very much, you know, a work in progress at this moment is really valuable. And also, we're really excited to see the master plan come out and then, you know, sort of be here witnessing the moment when it becomes, you know, it's about to become zoning. And, you know, I've lived in this area for about 30 years and have have watched Medford and know so many people who live here. And I'm so excited for what feels like Medford's moment to really come. And so just that's a side note. So Doug really sort of hit on what's important to us about the site. And what's true also about the site is that it's very small, 82 feet by 90 feet plus or minus. And so it's really it's sort of a very constrained site and the opportunity to work there is something that we have to be sort of inventive. So what we're proposing is that it would be a building that really takes the footprints of the site plan and extrudes it up to buildings that have labs in them. And this is sort of an incubator startup ramp up. type of place and these are so these are wet labs have a tremendous amount of mechanical equipment and we need space for those in addition to the labs themselves parking in vertical circulation chemical storage are all parts of a building like this and so we're sort of creating that building in It's easier in increments of 250,000 square feet. Let's just say that. And so we're doing it in miniature here. But I think it's actually appropriate for where this part of the metro Boston is and where life science is at this moment. It's really kind of seeding the area with this type of facility. there's a real flywheel that's really healthy in the Boston area and Tufts is a large contributor to that. So to kind of dig into the building a little bit specifically, it's, you know, very early stages and I looked at the presentation this morning after I had been designing to turn it over to the design team and it looks different now than when I last left. It's intended to be a very austere building and sort of sculptural and beautiful. Eight stories tall, seven stories of lab space above a ground floor that's got lobbies, utility spaces, storage, and some parking. And so in this iteration, we're seeing some more sort of figural work on the facade. And what I think the designer is doing is acknowledging the height of this building and really until it has neighbors that join it of this sort, it's going to have a physical presence. This is, so this is Harvard app here in Medford or mystic app, and that direction so we this is part of the building looks back towards the skyline of Boston it's sort of south and east. really, you know, to get a little bit of altitude as an occupant of the building is actually a real positive and a real opportunity here. So these are some of the issues that we're sort of working through as we put the building into play. Looking at the ground floor, we understand that, you know, we're going to have There's a couple of different things that a science building needs to do. One is we need to accommodate our occupants and the people who are going to do the science here. But we also need to accommodate loading of materials. There's a significant amount of different types of chemicals and compounds and things that are used in the science that is done in the types of companies that we expect to attract here. And so that the loading dock in the service elevator chemical storage and other types of storage are sort of the lungs of a science building. So we start the design with how we're going to do the loading dock and the trash removal and work from there. And so we we first pass is that we would have an entrance to the inside of the building on the ground floor off Harvard Ave and delivery and trash removal would have direct access to a loading dock and the service elevator right in that area. Cars would turn right through here and we've got a 24-foot wide access area here which could accommodate turning radiuses and so forth and allow cars to pull in and out. And we have nine free car stacking mechanisms in this area. So we have a total of 27 cars that would be able to accommodate. As we get deeper into really working with the mechanical engineers and structural engineers and understanding exactly how much utility space we're going to need. There's a possibility that we could add parking and when we add a space with our plan, we add three. And so that's our concept from the start. people would come in either from the street through here, or a car can come in from this direction into the entry lobby. We've got space blocked out, again, sort of very cartoony. It might be this big, it might be some mechanical space, and here is two. But you know, so when we say retail, we understand that retail in 2023 in the United States, you know, doesn't exist as bricks and sticks, doesn't exist as products that you walk into a place and leave money and take a product out. It's really, it's probably a hospitality operation of some sort. You know, I think the chemistry of coffee is actually very important in life science. And so providing for that is actually something that the tenant partner that we're working with insists on and feels that's an important part of the program. So that's there. The occupants would take their cup of coffee and go up the elevator and up to the top.

[Unidentified]: Sorry?

[Matthew Juros]: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so obviously, we want to make this as vibrant and viable an operation as possible so that that hospitality tenant is definitely open to the public. We want to be able to invite people to join us in here. The designers imagined that maybe there would be a food truck or something along those lines that we could line up if we have the sidewalk space on Harvard Avenue. You know, kind of picking ideas around and seeing what sticks is really what we're doing at this point. So, you know, at press time here, this is just a snapshot of where we are at this moment. And the pieces, I think, are the pieces that we want to have to work with where they show up and how they interact is still a work in process. progress. Another option that we're not going to dig too deeply into. And a typical science floor, and each of the floors above the ground floor, are going to follow this this pattern. And we'll just take the path of an occupant, a scientist coming to work in the morning, coming up the elevator or getting their steps in the stairs, which is what I would do if I need them. And so there's labs and science buildings like this have two types of space where the work is done. We think of people standing in white coats at a lab bench with beakers and vent hoods and so forth, and that's an important part of how this type of work is done. But also, you know, another important inseparable part of the work is done at desks and on computers. And so what people do is sort of doing research, setting up experiments, reporting and correlating and sort of finalizing results and so forth. This is all basically an office space. So, you know, the big headlines are about lab benches and invent hoods, and water treatment, and so forth. And it's inescapable. But really, 40% of the leasable space is going to be office. It's a simple layout. We've got a set of desks as a demonstration laid out here. And that migrates past the conference room that would be open to the tenants, phone booths here, into open workspace that are less formal than sitting at a desk doing your work there, so maybe it's community tables, maybe there's a kitchen set up, and then you know typical facilities, as scientists tend to be humans, and we need to do So we walk in and we go and walk, we'll likely have a glass barrier between the office space and the science area. As you saw from the exterior, we intend to start our design life here with a exterior on Mystic Ave and Harvard Ave, Harvard Street, of primarily glass. And so we're looking at that glass curtain wall for starters, and really that's about sunlight and it's about people. It's about, you know, the impact of the building visually on the neighborhood, and so it's sort of a the first pass that we're taking. And so we're imagining that there would be a tremendous amount of sunlight coming in through here, especially in the morning hours, and that we would want to put glass walls between the office area and the science area in order to share some of that sunlight. We have, I think, five or six foot lab benches set up here. The leasing concept that Sunlit is thinking about is that these would be available, a six foot lab bench at a time or a group of them, or you could take one whole section. So it's a very flexible type of arrangement that allows for incubators type companies, real early stage startups, people who are working through seed money and coming up with their initial, testing their initial science for their ideas. And through ramp up and 1,000, 2,000 square foot spaces maybe a little bit more than that as the maximum tenant increment. So lab, the work is done on these lab benches, there's benches associated with them. And then there's a series of ancillary spaces that support each lab space that lab support, oddly enough. And in lab support rooms, there are a series of different instruments that would be shared by the different companies and scientists that are working in the formal lab area. So there's very sophisticated and expensive equipment that companies at this stage simply aren't going to buy. So a facility like this makes them available as a way to monetize their use and to organize, you know, who signs them out, who gets to use them and when and so forth. So microscopy, autoclave, also there's a whole series of different types of pieces of equipment that we use. There's refrigeration, and that's all going on in the ancillary support rooms. There's also a group of chemicals and reagents and things that most of this type of science uses as the basis of the work that they're doing. And so we also store some of that material here, most of it on the ground floor level. And then as it's needed upstairs in increments of use, probably on a daily or weekly basis, it migrates upstairs. The building code requires that we Well, it limits the amount of certain chemicals that we can store above the ground floor level. So it's sort of a carefully orchestrated dance of how much and what and where those chemicals are stored. But there's also a way to distribute this in provide it for scientists, you know, a beaker at a time or a quart at a time. And so the operation of the facility will organize that and monetize that as well. And then the balance of the space is a stairway. We're gonna have a significant amount of vertical circulation, or sorry, vertical shaft space here. And then this is service elevator. So we really have sort of a service core back in this area where materials and chemicals are brought up from below and directly into the support rooms and then out into the labs. continue on here. And I think that really sort of takes you through the basics of the type of building that we're talking about, what the pieces are, and how we're arranging them in our first passes. We've taken a good look at sort of in preparation for more substantial conversations about what existing zoning is and where we are with our proposal. And so we're here to sort of talk that through as well. And this talks about the fact that what you'll see often in, say, an office building or other types of commercial space use is the full occupancy of the space with a single use at the times when the building's being used. Science buildings have non-simultaneous occupancy, meaning a scientist who's working at this lab bench here will occupy that room for part of the day and then they'll go into their desk for another part of the day, leaving that lab bench and that lab area vacant. So when the actual populations of these and so forth is, you know, the code doesn't really reflect non-simultaneous use. You know, we have to design as though the whole place was having a party, so when we design the size of the exit stairs and so forth. But the reality of who's going to be using this is it's really half the space gets used at a time, which allows us to be confident about the amount of parking that we're putting in here. You know, that particular aspect non-simultaneous use in lab buildings and the proximity to multiple types of public transportation kind of factor into that equation. Do you want to talk through some of the ideas?

[Doug Medvets]: Yeah, yeah. Just real quickly, I wanted to mention here that we do, and I mentioned this a little bit at the beginning, but we do, because Khadijah and I come from a science background, we do want to promote what's called STEAM now, but the science, technology, engineering, arts, and math students, whether they're at the universities, whether at the high school, We did develop a program in Chelsea with the building that we got approved to have a direct relationship with the high school, where the students were able to be exposed to science at an early age, or much earlier than normal. I wasn't exposed to the sciences until I was an undergrad. And so we are very big proponents of that, but also the non-STEAM students. We have been working with DPR construction, and a lot of the construction companies offer this, but they all they offer internships throughout the construction of the building. So if there are students who are interested in anything non science related so engineering. construction for that matter. They will offer them an internship, they give them computers, they bring them in throughout the entire process. So students can really learn what types of jobs are out there and get some hands-on learning. So we do want to make it clear that those are important to us. as we're building these buildings. And we've already mentioned that there's some publicly accessible space on the first floor of this building. That's something we think is obviously important for any building that goes into any city. And so just wanted to briefly touch on some of that and happy to answer any specifics if you have questions on that. And then, yeah, I think that I think we'll leave it there. We didn't, you know, we wanted to give you a good idea of what we're thinking about here, but we wanted to get a lot. We wanted to get more feedback than anything. And so, you know, whatever questions, comments, concerns, we're happy to hear them now. We're happy to make changes. We're happy to answer anything we can at this moment to.

[David Blumberg]: Okay, thank you for the, for the presentation and all the information that you've shared with us and your vision for the site. Can I open this up to one of my colleagues on the board for maybe start with some questions that you may have.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: Kim and Bloomberg, this is Jackie. I do have some clarifying questions. First and foremost, like with any kind of new development in a community, especially by something as great as life sciences, it's really awesome for economic development opportunities, right? And so it would be really, and I guess in our interest to try to figure out how we can help the proponents to move forward. There's some questions that I have. Um overall lab and science is not my forte and one of the things that I'm having a hard that I guess I would be having a hard time is even given preliminary information on like building materials or um, like What we'll be doing blanket conditions and contingencies if if these If these tenants are all different, and would the space be retrofitted to each chemical that they're bringing? I don't know that without the building department's comments, without the health department, the fire chief's comments. So as far as what we would be doing for the overall material in the building itself, that escapes me. But I mean, I can stick definitely to give some feedback on parking and other outside factors, but the material overall. I'm just not up on without the city's feedback.

[David Blumberg]: Maybe you can just sort of piggyback on Jackie's question, because it was part of mine as well as like is there one tenant that's managing the building so they're sort of taking the overall lab. Yeah, yeah, that's maybe that's a way to enter Jackie's answer.

[Doug Medvets]: Sure, that's not it's a great question. So, yes, we, we have a tenant for the building already. They are a bio incubator. So there will be 1 overarching company that manages all the individual companies. So, so.

[Matthew Juros]: It's not that they are a bio incubator, but I like to call them sort of we work for science. Is that?

[Unidentified]: Yeah.

[Matthew Juros]: So we would lease it to one company who would then sublease to smaller companies, a lab venture or 10 or three at a time.

[Doug Medvets]: And they have a plan already. The reason we chose this group is they also have a science background. And so they've already thought about a lot of the issues that are being brought up with questions, right? Managing the chemicals coming in and out, where do they need to go? How are they controlled? Part of Matt's team too, we have code consultants, we have fire consultants, we have people telling us sort of how we need to do these things so that when we bring it to a city like Medford, we're not, you know, hoping that the fire department or the health department's gonna tell us what to do. We try to come as prepared as possible so that a lot of those questions can be answered. But yes, there will be a very qualified company managing everything going on in this building, all the way down to, you know, you know, some of the transportation issues, right? We're thinking about partnerships with not only a shuttle system, but car services to help get people in and out of different areas. If they want to travel to Cambridge, right, that comes up a lot. How do we get to Cambridge? So we're thinking about all of those things and this company Skylet, which we're happy to share information if need be about them. They've already, yeah, they're the overarching tenant. We've already signed a lease. They love this location. They're actually helping us design the building as well. So that's all available.

[SPEAKER_05]: To add to what Doug said and to answer one of your questions, Jack. the place, the building itself, the lab space, it's not going to be retrofitted to each individual company because all companies in this stage all have very similar needs. And so all of the lab support that is going to be used to support every single one of these companies is going to be retrofitted generally exactly what these companies need. And as far as like hood space and filtration systems and water treatments, all of that is going to be applicable to every single one of these companies at this stage. So it's not going to be retrofitted to each company specifically because they all need the same things. And as far as like chemicals, we have consultants who know the code and the storage of the chemicals and they're very, you know, the basic scientists are all using the same, very similar chemicals and very specific aliquots will be used to go up to the higher floors and not in high quantities that would cause any issues in the building. But we have consultants who know the code and who It's true, we do.

[Matthew Juros]: And one of the things, too, to keep in mind is we call them companies, but it's really a few friends from graduate school and an idea. And they come and go. They come and grow and move on or take more space. But there's a bit of a churn with companies at this stage.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: Which they're pretty much looking for support as they test their ideas and maybe even get like venture capital kind of thing. Exactly.

[Doug Medvets]: Yeah. So the idea here is. Over the years, we've sort of gained a lot of knowledge and perspective on how these companies succeed, right? Some science is going to fail regardless. And so the idea is to create a roadmap for these companies to succeed and allow them to come into these spaces and really do what they do best. And that's science. And we take care of all the other sort of issues that companies don't even think about when they're starting. So yeah, it's really a, we call it incubator, but it's almost like a, you know, creating a roadmap for success. And part of that is when to raise money, how to raise money, teaching them how to communicate, things like that. Yeah, so it's gonna be a very sort of hands-on, full-service type of science building.

[SPEAKER_05]: And hopefully as they grow and raise more money, they stick around and stay in the community and offer more jobs and participate in the community development as well.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: Thank you.

[David Blumberg]: Thank you.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: Did you also were you raising a question on parking, just, I didn't want to know, I was, I was sort of reiterating that I mean I can speak on parking at this early stage of the game but I was, you know, I wouldn't be able to speak on other things without the city's input.

[David Blumberg]: Okay, got you. A class I see your hand up, would you like to go next.

[zMDmsK0LIsU_SPEAKER_03]: Yes. Thank you for presenting tonight. I have actually turning out to be a good list of questions here. I guess the first one that I'm, and I'm not expecting that you would answer all these tonight but maybe this is something that you could either furnish to us for the next meeting or at the next meeting. I think we just need to have a really good understanding of what variances you're seeking here. you know, what does this building look like by right? And what does it look like? And what's the difference that you guys are suggesting? I'm guessing it's seven or eight stories tall, plus the penthouse in a life science building that's gonna be in the order of 150 feet. I just wanted to say that so everybody on the board can hear that. And that sort of brings me to my next question. My whole, I guess, section of questions here. Really would like to see shadow studies, really would like to see views of the building from the surrounding neighborhood, because just building is going to be way out of scale with anything around it so it's, I think for it to have any hope of gathering. positive reviews, we're going to need to understand how it sits on the site and how it's playing nice with its neighbors because everything here is pretty much a story or two to three story would frame home in the neighborhood to the west. This is sort of in that category as well you're suggesting. basically blank facades on the west and north side, which is troubling to me. I know you talked about some sculptural panels and maybe some lighting, but that sort of another step in the wrong direction possibly because it's really not playing nice with the neighbors. I don't know if there's an anticipation of a zero outlawing condition, but I just think we need to understand that a little better. And I think you need to address those blank facades because they're a little troubling.

[Matthew Juros]: Can we jump in or do you want to go through this stuff and we'll talk about it?

[zMDmsK0LIsU_SPEAKER_03]: Why don't you let me finish my list? I hope you're writing this down. We are. I think the design of the building seems okay to me. It's not feeling completely contextual, although the evolving feel of Mystic Ave, who knows? But the one thing I did find a little bit curious was the fact that you have this sort of glass building and then on the Harvard Street facade, And even on the Mystic Ave side, you basically have solid walls. You have a couple of punched openings on Mystic Ave. And I'm wondering why the glass doesn't just come down to the ground and why we have a blank facade on the Mystic side next to the garage entry. It feels like you took the auto body shop that burned down and you just put this glass building on top of it. Um, I, I think the, I think the parking strategy seems good to me. I mean, you know, I think most people on this board are for less parking. Um, that said, um, be careful because there's nowhere else to park in this area. So, so, um, you're going to get a lot of neighbors, um, asking what you're doing about parking. What else? I think the shadow studies are gonna be really important because at 10 in the morning, there's gonna be a lot of shadows on that residential neighborhood. Yeah, just make sure we include views from the ground, looking down Harvard Ave, looking down Mystic Ave of what this building will look like on its site, because I think that's, again, important in telling the story of how it plays nice with its neighbors and its neighborhood. That's it for me. Appreciate that. All right, one last thing, I understand

[Unidentified]: The layout of the ground floor seems a little curious.

[zMDmsK0LIsU_SPEAKER_03]: I know there's two schemes. It seems a little curious to put the conference room on the corner. Ideally, even if it's sort of a little whatever retail, to me that feels like that should be on the corner. I know you have a pinch point with the elevator and stair up there that makes putting the lobby back there probably difficult, but I don't know. That main corner, I suppose the scheme that has the entry on the corner feels okay, but for me it really feels like it should be retail and then the office entry should be along. Mystic Ave side. Yeah, I think, oh, and then my final point, I understand that you have the entry to the garage off of Harvard, but I don't know if you've been in that area around 5 p.m. or on any weekend or at any time when there's increased traffic, but there is, a line from this light back to the next. So often it's going to be, it's going to be a very tricky spot to be, um, to be back in trucks in real.

[Doug Medvets]: Yeah, that's a really good point.

[zMDmsK0LIsU_SPEAKER_03]: Um, I do have more things. Um, Along with the things that I'd love to see is, it looks like there's sort of that traditional big mystic swath of asphalt between the street and the building face. I would love to see a landscaping plan and how you're gonna address that.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Yeah, absolutely.

[zMDmsK0LIsU_SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.

[Unidentified]: Yeah, thank you.

[Matthew Juros]: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for a close look.

[David Blumberg]: Thank you, Clayce. Christy, I see your hand is up.

[Jenny Graham]: Yes, hi. Well, Clayce always does a great job.

[David Blumberg]: He does.

[Jenny Graham]: Going through the details. So I love when he goes first because he takes care of most of our lists. But I concur with all of Clayce's comments and suggestions for more information next time you come and see us. I would like to say I'm really excited that this type of project is being proposed. for Mystic Ave and I have followed your project in Chelsea and those plans are very, very nice. So I am hopeful and positive of the type of building design that you can bring here as well. I would just keep it brief in terms of where I'm particularly focused. I share concerns with those blank walls. It seems more inward facing to me and when you're looking at this being almost like the first really major development of this type in this area and what could come in the future, I think you need to think about it in that context and being more open and inviting to its surroundings. I am interested in the pedestrian level perspective. I'd like to really see what that looks like at that level. So as you think about additional views and then also landscape and hardscape plan would be good. I think activating that street level so it does have retail or more of a community access space is important rather than a conference room that may not always get used and tend to be empty. If you are trying to program it as community space that it's not really activated, it would just be unfortunate to have a space that is empty. I think that covers it. Yeah, that's it. Thank you.

[Unidentified]: Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

[Deanna Peabody]: I'll go next.

[David Blumberg]: Excellent. Thank you.

[Deanna Peabody]: I agree with place and Christie, especially with the shadow study and then also a traffic study so we can see the impacts, especially with the loading of the vehicles and the pedestrians and what mitigation can be can be done for the area.

[Adam Hurtubise]: We're intending to do both.

[Doug Medvets]: Yeah, traffic study is underway with Van Assen associates. I know they were the same firm that was working with combined properties. I was at their intro meeting for the potential project across the street. So yes, we do have some traffic studies underway.

[Matthew Juros]: Yeah. And once we get a little deeper into developing the building exterior, you will definitely look at shadow studies or share our shadow studies with you and put them in the context with the surrounding buildings. And this is the thing that we've, as we've masked up the building, we're continuing looking at those. And so definitely want to share that.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Do you know what the

[Matthew Juros]: The height is? So 125 feet to the parapet and then a 20 foot, yeah. And so 125 feet to the parapet and then 20 foot mechanical mezzanine. So that's the height.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Do you know what the combined properties height is across the street? We should get that. We'll make those comparisons. But let's get that information and send it to them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[David Blumberg]: I mean, I think I don't see George on the right.

[Amanda Centrella]: Yes, sorry he had to step away.

[David Blumberg]: Okay, no problem. I know that I'm, I'm batting last that that's fine. No problem. So, Deanna is that, are you good. I don't want to cut you off.

[Deanna Peabody]: Yes, I'm good.

[David Blumberg]: Okay, thanks. Thank you. So, I guess, I feel like the design of the building from A marketability point of view, maybe you're not that worried about it if you have somebody who wants it this way. But I can't help but share my instinctive reaction which is you're going to have a hard time finding successor tenants, when you have almost no parking whatsoever. If you try to do something different with the building. It's just, it just strikes me as it's going to be an impediment to the subsequent tenants or your sale of the building to, to somebody else but that's just my two cents.

[Doug Medvets]: I'm happy to address that right now. We believe, because of our industry knowledge, that this building will consistently be incubator space, number one. Number two, we're not planning to develop this and sell this. We are actually partnering with the incubator group. They want us on as a small equity partner. And we plan to stay on with them and basically keep this building as is for that's obviously the initial plan. And so, I hear what you're saying, because that does come up right with, especially with lending partners right money partners they're always like if we're going to bring money to this to this building. what happens if you need to change out the tenant type, right? So we do think about that, but we have spent a lot of time and energy really understanding the life science market. And I think that's why we feel very confident in designing the building this way. The other thing I would say, and you're absolutely correct, David, if we change the asset classes with the parking. But with the biotech and the life science companies, we think pushing less parking is important. And those are things that we're hearing from companies. They want accessibility that doesn't require driving to work. And so that's, again, why we chose this site. But you do bring up a great point in terms of successor tenants. So we will definitely think about that as we're presenting this in the future. That's a good thing to think about.

[Matthew Juros]: One of the realities of this type of building too is because of the structural requirements and the utility space and the amount of mechanical equipment and the type of mechanical equipment that the building has, they don't convert easily into you know, office buildings or residential buildings. A different type of science, maybe. But that's sort of more likely the type of evolution that the property would have.

[David Blumberg]: Yeah. Okay. Interesting. In addition to the sort of street level views, I guess at some point it would be also nice to understand exactly what your top floor or mechanical level is is going to appear, or how it will appear to the neighborhood as well because I imagine that much of the city will be able to see that, or maybe you'll be concealing and it won't be seen but that would be I think something that the public would also be interested in. Usually we ask about electrical vehicle parking and that sort of thing that may not be relevant here. But we do always ask about other things such as bike storage, you know, showers, that sort of thing which I imagine is on your shortlist given the audience, the potential employees you're trying to attract to the building. Yep. So those are always of interest to us. You don't have to answer this now, but it'd just be interesting to hear a little bit about what your construction plan is, because you've got no elbow room. How are you going to do it?

[Matthew Juros]: find find a lay down site and rent space, maybe right. Yeah. Which is I think what the site is used for right now, someone else's construction.

[Doug Medvets]: Okay, yeah, no that's a, that is a good question and we will have some discussion about that. you know, we will make sure we hire a construction company that has a good reputation, right, that that is has worked in spaces like this or in tight quarters. So because it is, it will be an issue. There's as, as Clay's already mentioned, there's a lot of traffic there at certain times of the day. So we want to try to minimize any impact that we have. as much as we can. So yes, thanks for bringing that up.

[Matthew Juros]: I've sat in that line of traffic many times over the years, and I'm very familiar with the intersection. DPR did a construction traffic plan for us with the Chelsea project, and we'll be doing that again in these early stages as this continues, because that's another sort of ballet of you know, which times of day are we really feasibly going to be able to deliver this equipment and materials and so forth to where, how does it get from where it's stored to the site? So this is a pretty in-depth planning exercise that we're going to engage as we get a little deeper into the process.

[David Blumberg]: Yeah, I imagine if you were putting this up in Cambridge, that's par for the course over there, but it feels like it's an entirely different scenario for us to see it here.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Yeah.

[David Blumberg]: I guess on the public transportation, and I had some questions I tried to answer for myself this week. You would, I think in one of the images showed the potential for a bus stop and I don't know how feasible that is because it seems so close to the intersection but putting that aside just the, the 95 bus route. You know I know again this is the MBTA and I see one thing on one part of the website and I see another on the other side and I don't know which is which but there seem to be some plans to reduce 95 or shifted over more to main street. So, coming off the discussion about the comprehensive plan it's a shame that we're, we're thinking about areas that are prime for development in this city where the MBTA is looking to cut back service but I just, I don't know what the future plans are there and I don't know how that's going to work with, with what you're what you're planning for your building.

[Doug Medvets]: Yeah, I think we were thinking more along the lines of less bus route usage and more driving the employees working in the building to places like the Tufts Station or Ball Square Station or even Wellington Station or Davis Square, and having a shuttle service at specific times of the day where it picks them up there, brings them to the building, drops them off, and then there's no need for the bus route or even parking. That's been what we've been thinking about because I think that all of those stations are close enough. that we could commission some shuttle service that's already doing shuttle trips during the day to add in some of these or even have very specific ones just for this building. So that's something we put a lot of thought into. And I think that's more along the lines of where I think it'll be more functional as opposed to pushing these companies to say, hey, use the bus, right? And one of the things we've been thinking about is approaching the MBTA and saying, can you subsidize some of these things or how can we work together to make this work? What's that? Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And yeah. And city bikes too. And blue bikes and things like that. But in terms of leveraging the actual train stations, I think that's the way to go. And that's worked. We stole that from some other developments. There's a development in, where is that at? Abbey labs in Natick. So they are about a mile from the Natick train station and that's what they do. They have a shuttle that picks people up at certain times, it just brings them directly to their building and they said, The tenants will love that, because it's just very easy for them to get to that station, get the shuttle right to the building they don't have to worry about parking or even riding bikes and, and a lot of them you know during the summer will walk that distance but when the weather gets not as nice here. It's good to have those types of ideas, so we're definitely considering that as a strategy.

[David Blumberg]: Yeah, I like the sound of that.

[SPEAKER_05]: We also utilize that service quite a bit when we were in the lab at Brigham, taking the shuttle to all the way to Cambridge and then or to the different train stations that are close by. So we definitely utilize that service quite a bit and it was free service for us. So we plan to bring all the things that worked out for us and has been working for all of our colleagues currently. and bring it into this building utilize what's working.

[David Blumberg]: It is a different presentation that will be usually see in, in terms of the parking because you're usually it's well we're a little bit short.

[SPEAKER_05]: We're definitely trying to promote less driving, less pollution, more using the services that already exist out there. And that's definitely a thing that we like to stay environmentally friendly as much as possible, given the type of building this is.

[David Blumberg]: So it's an interesting me, you're, you're much more invested in the success of those types of programs because you haven't given the folks the other alternative, you know, so the sincerity of your, of your interest in getting that kind of a program off the ground is maybe different than some of the other developments we see. So it's a, it's, it's just interesting. This is all sort of new for us to see a building like this on Mystic Ave and to see parking of, of this smaller number. A lot of things for us to see for the first time and we'll need a little time to digest these you know.

[Doug Medvets]: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is good for us to it's great to hear all this feedback so that we can, you know, it's, it's easy for us to think that everything, things are going to work but it's also good to hear from you guys to say here's what you know has been worked in the past so the feedback is great.

[SPEAKER_05]: We also hope that what we're bringing to the city and the ideas that we're trying to implement are aligned with the future of your plans for the city as well.

[Matthew Juros]: If I can just take a quick minute to address one of the things that the class brought up that kind of Scooties, zeroed right in, I'm gonna get you a set of grappling whips, you know? And thank you for that. Yeah, the walls that are not glass. Oh, please, yep. I don't wanna call them blank, and I don't wanna call them those other words, but yeah, no, we completely get how, what type of gesture that could be to the presidential neighborhoods of Atlanta. behind the building. But I want to share the challenge that we're up against. You need to have a fire rated wall when you're within X number of feet, 20 feet of a lot line, 15 feet and you can have windows of a certain size, 10 feet and they're much smaller, five feet and they can have protected openings. This is all viciously expensive. And we're at a two foot lot line and a zero lot line on those two walls. In order to get the leaseable area for this building to pencil. So we're looking at all sorts of different ways to make that not the wrong thing. And obviously, there's ways of doing patterns of cladding that work with the pattern of fenestration on the other walls. So there's a variation between the opacity and opaqueness. those two zero lot line or small lot line walls. There are some materials that are translucent that develop a two-hour fire rating. Looking at those, again, viciously expensive, but we understand that this is, you have to be able to make it right for all four sides. It's a building that's gonna be a four-sided building. It's not going to be couched for many years by other buildings. But that's the challenge that we're up against. And so how we solve that, and maybe it's going to be how we collaborate to solve that, that's part of the work that's ahead of us.

[zMDmsK0LIsU_SPEAKER_03]: I have one minor, maybe final comment about Maybe tying into that a little bit. When you were first presenting, you were sort of calling the design idea like a pure extrusion of the site itself, which I completely agree that that's what we're seeing. And I sort of wonder whether that gesture is actually the thing that's that's making those blank walls particularly conspicuous to us. And I wonder if there's a way to sort of form the back two sides in a way, obviously everything I'm talking about here is minus square footage, but is there a way to sort of release the stranglehold of that pure extrusion and then do something that, gives a little bit of form on those backsides that would create that relief that I think we're looking for. And I'm sort of thinking of a light well or something where you could throw some glass in there or something. Because it truly does look like you see in the renderings you have That you shared with us that, you know, it looks very. Finished on the, you know, on the South and East side, like very. Civic and very, and then you go around the back and you're like, well, you know, so in a way, I wonder whether. You're starting to do this on Mystic Ab, but I'm wondering if a little bit of the back actually needs to creep into the front so that there's more of an equilibrium between the solid and the void.

[Matthew Juros]: And I think that's what I was kind of hinting at is the next set of developments are going to be to maybe add more solids around the glass walls and start to blend those two expressions. But you kind of triggered me a little bit. I wonder if there's an opportunity to actually do something sculptural and special on those walls. And we're looking at them as a wall. But what if there is, we can make the space functional as long as we do. But we could, what if those walls had a sculptural sort of profile to them? What if they danced a little bit? And this is why we collaborate, right? This is why we kick these ideas around. I think we want to explore that as well. Thank you for that.

[David Blumberg]: Doug and Matt if there's something that you want to come back and see us we have sort of regularly scheduled meetings if you just wanted to come back and and throw a few visuals at us because this is something you know you're kicking stuff around and it's not the full final presentation but you want to something up on the board, we're happy to give you a reaction. Okay, thank you for that.

[Matthew Juros]: Yeah, let's take another couple of weeks and get a little deeper in, and I think we'll get ourselves back on the agenda, and we appreciate your time and close looking.

[David Blumberg]: All right, well, Unless there's anything else from the board I would like to thank you very much for your discussion and all the information you've shared with us tonight. Thank you for your interest in Medford we look forward to seeing you again.

[Doug Medvets]: Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

[David Blumberg]: Thanks. Okay, next item on the agenda is the approval of what consideration I should say of minutes from November 10 of last year. Any comments on the minutes? For myself, I did read them. I didn't have any suggested changes, but.

[Jenny Graham]: I just had one that was more like just grammatical. OK. I think where it talks about the configuration to get to the increased number of units, I think it really should be reconfiguration, it's reconfiguration of the existing space. I know it's a minor thing, but it's the only, she does so good, that was the only thing that jumped out.

[David Blumberg]: I'm kicking myself, I missed that one. Okay, subject to that little change, do we have a motion to approve minutes?

[Jenny Graham]: I'll make a motion to approve.

[David Blumberg]: Excellent, is there a second? Outstanding roll call vote then to approve the minutes. Vice Chair Jackie Furtado.

[Jacqueline McPherson]: I actually abstain from those minutes.

[David Blumberg]: Okay, okay. Okay, I called on you. Hi, Christie doubt.

[zMDmsK0LIsU_SPEAKER_03]: Hi.

[David Blumberg]: And I'm an eye as well. Do we have enough there 123 Yep, we should have enough.

[Alicia Hunt]: David, I just wanted to take a second to introduce you guys. Wren doesn't usually make the meetings and she wasn't introduced at the beginning. She's the graduate student from Tufts who's actually been doing the minutes for these meetings all along. So I just thought- Thank you, Wren. Everybody else was gone to take a second to introduce Wren. She's been with our office since last June.

[David Blumberg]: Wren, you're doing a great job. And I think we've, we've seen the minutes like for me not to have any comments on the minutes, Amanda, go ahead. You can make fun of me. That's you're doing a great job. So I do appreciate it, and it really helps to have the minutes squared away. And so that we don't go back and forth over them, we can quickly approve them. And it is important to get the record straight, obviously, so we understand what we did and why we did it. So thank you very much for your efforts. We really appreciate it as a board.

[Deanna Peabody]: Thanks, everyone. I actually enjoy doing them, and I enjoy sitting in on the meetings too, believe it or not.

[David Blumberg]: That's why you're in the program you're in, right?

[SPEAKER_06]: That might be the first time I've ever heard anyone say that they enjoy doing meeting minutes, but that's impressive.

[Alicia Hunt]: I think Wren is a born planner. She did engineering as her undergrad, but she is like a zoning nerd. I've had her re-watch zoning meetings, like the city council. So like, what exactly did we say at that point? So I just, she's going to be a great planner. She is a great planner.

[David Blumberg]: Awesome. Good job, Brennan. You've chosen the right field. Good for you. Okay. Any other updates? Amanda, do you have anything for us?

[Amanda Centrella]: Nothing too new on my end, unless Alicia or Danielle or anyone had things they wanted to throw in.

[David Blumberg]: Do you want to mention next meeting?

[Amanda Centrella]: Yes, thank you. Yes, so we do have a meeting on the books February 1st. So far, the only thing that is on the agenda is an A&R discussion. So we think it'll be quick, unless something wild comes up in the next two weeks. So yeah, if anyone has any questions about that, or if they expect that they may not be able to attend, just let me know. And as long as we have quorum, then we're good to go.

[David Blumberg]: Excellent. So on that note, a motion to adjourn could be entertained at this point. I will make that motion. And second on the motion to adjourn.

[Adam Hurtubise]: I'll second.

[David Blumberg]: Excellent. We'll call vice chair, Jackie for topic.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Yes.

[David Blumberg]: Yes. Yes. Yes.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Yes.

[David Blumberg]: And I mean yes as well. Everyone thanks for your time and attention tonight, we'll see you in a couple of weeks. Thank you all.

[Amanda Centrella]: Thank you. Good night.

[David Blumberg]: Thank you.

Nicole Morell total time: 10.74 minutes total words: 248	Richard Caraviello total time: 1.0 minutes total words: 90	Zac Bears total time: 0.95 minutes total words: 97	Jenny Graham total time: 2.35 minutes total words: 202