Commission meeting for today, Tuesday, August 12th.

We're gonna start off the agenda.

We have a presentation that the city from the city considering waterfront transit-oriented development.

So this is just a presentation for the board members.

We could have some questions.

It's not open to the public right at the moment, but there will be a time for input later on.

But so call up whoever's doing it first.

Yeah, I wanted to say just a couple of words of explanation and introduction, and then I'll I'll um get uh Sarah's setup.

So um as we've discussed the city's, you know, interested in redeveloping three of the city owned uh commuter parking lots on the waterfront um for housing and mixed use.

As a part of that, the city has um engaged BFJ planning to help us conduct a cumulative study of the cumulative impacts of the develop overall developments.

Um and this is just to say that we're looking at the the bigger picture.

And e before each development comes in before the planning commission, they'll have to conduct their own individual um site plan review.

Um excuse me, environmental review.

I wanted to make that very clear to you and to everyone watching.

Um we will have uh public events, including a public hearing before the planning commission for people to comment on the scope.

Right now we're really just looking at the scope, basically.

What are we going to study?

Not the results of the study, but what are we going to study?

Um and we'll be having an event in early September that we're inviting everyone to come and just learn more about the project and and learn more about the environmental review.

So I'm gonna introduce uh Sarah Yaekel, who's a principal at BFJ Planning, who's leading our our um planning study here, our environmental review, and I'm gonna get her set up on the laptop.

So bear with me.

You can probably get in there.

Oh, good.

Why is that?

Can you minimize that strip?

Sure.

Possibly.

Thanks.

Thanks, Carol.

Good evening, Chair Stern, members of the planning commission.

As Carol said, my name is Sarah Yegel.

I'm a principal with BFJ planning.

We've been retained by the city to assist in the cumulative review of the environmental impacts associated with the three transit-oriented development sites.

Um tonight I'm just going to walk you through a document that you all have uh received in your packets, which is the report outline, the proposed report outline for the cumulative environmental impact report.

We're at the very preliminary stages of this study and are really in the process of scoping out the table of contents to make sure that all of the issues that you would like addressed in the study, that the uh common council would like addressed in the study as well as the public are included in this document.

So I'm gonna start with just a quick introduction of our team, talk a little bit about the proposed project for those watching at home or in the audience, uh, get into what is this cumulative environmental impact report, the purpose, the contents, and then a little bit of a just a status update on some traffic and parking work that we've done to date and talk about next steps.

Uh so again, BFJ planning is the prime consultant on this project.

I'll be joined by Emily Tolbert as project manager, our traffic engineer George Ackmar, and then Nick Sidera, our project planner.

We're also in jo uh joined in this effort by Urbanomics who specialize in socioeconomic and demographic analysis.

They'll be providing uh in-depth analysis of socioeconomic and fiscal impacts related to the projects.

And then finally, we're joined by Ramble, who are an international engineering firm specializing in infrastructure and climate adaptation and resiliency.

Given the waterfront location of these sites, we thought that that was critically important to have on the team uh that special expertise.

So uh I think you may be familiar, I believe you probably are familiar with these, but the city is looking to redevelop um three city-owned parking lots east of the Metro North Railroad tracks.

You can see the locations uh on the map there.

And the city issued an uh a request for expression of interest for parking lot redevelopment and is currently negotiating with three private development groups for the redevelopment.

And at some point in the future, we'll be working through conditional dispositions of those lands, and ultimately probably zoning text or map changes and site plan approval before your board.

The cumulative development that we're looking at for these three sites is approximately 276 residential units, approximately 11,000 square feet of ground floor commercial, 125 hotel rooms, and 372 parking spaces.

So these would be across the three sites, and is really the foundation of this cumulative study.

So what is a cumulative environmental impact report?

As I said last night to the common council, as a term that I uh I coined.

Because when we originally brought on to do this work, we were planning to do a generic environmental impact statement under the State Environmental Quality Review Act.

I think you're probably all familiar with Seeker given the work that you do on site plan approvals and other things.

Um in order to do uh a seeker approval or seeker analysis or the generic environmental impact statement, we needed a discretionary action.

And the city is not yet at a stage where they're ready to make any discretionary actions.

There wasn't a rezoning uh action or even site plan approval.

We're two sort of preliminary in that process.

And so we are providing this sort of 10,000 uh, you know, foot view of the cumulative impacts.

Um but because we wanted to do this in a similar fashion to Seeker, which does have sort of a mandated process and statutory requirements and time frames.

We are still going to follow the steps in the seeker process.

So that's why you have before you essentially what it would be a seeker scoping document, but in this case it's the report outline for the cumulative environmental impact report, but it has all of the same sort of chapter headings that you would find in a in an EIS scoping document.