HomeMy WebLinkAbout2019-04-02-CPAC-min COMPREHENSIVE PLAN ADVISORY COMMITTEE
MEETING MINUTES
April 2, 2019
The meeting of the Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee (CPAC), held in the Parker room
of the Town Office Building at 1625 Massachusetts Avenue, Lexington MA was called to order
at 7:16pm by Chair Sarah Felton. CPAC members: Deepak Amenam, Stacy Beuttell, Hema
Bhatt, Matthew Daggett, Sarah Felton, Marilyn Fenollosa, Camille Goodwin, Carol Sue Hai,
Christian Senna, Patrick Sullivan, and Ruixi Yuan were present. The CPAC meeting was also
attended staff members, Julie Mercier, Molly Belanger, and Carol Kowalski. The meeting was
facilitated by Jeff Dietrich of Howard Stein Hudson.
********************Review of Comprehensive Plan Timeline ********************
Regional panel discussions—transportation, economic development, housing, etc.
Trend reports—pushing goal date out; tied to presentations happening now: demographics,
housing, and transportation
Stakeholder Interviews
Surveys—general demographic information survey will remain open throughout public input
process
Website—in process; working with town staff to ensure it works before launching; issues
regarding loading files should be resolved soon
3 months behind on draft plans
Currently the January 2020 goal completion date is not realistic and needs to be pushed back.
Planning Board wants a good product and would rather extend the expected completion date.
Committee members should submit summer schedules to staff so that they may coordinate
working group meetings.
************ Review of Demographic Trends************
Presenters should stay focused on presenting trends and existing conditions with minimal
commentary.
Older population in Lexington—is it growing or not? Different data sources used by presenters
have conflicting statistics.
There has been a big change in Lexington over the past 10 years; growth in the Asian population
Asian—first generation, children of Asian parents born in US —do they identify as Asians or
Americans—related to language spoken at home?
Reconcile housing information with housing presentation.
Travel time to work—less than 20-35 minutes: Burlington, Waltham, and Lincoln Labs
Planning Staff should find out the sample sizes used by American Community Survey.
Minutes for the Meeting of January 5, 2017 Page 2
2012-2017 Vision Survey Data had 1200 participants in 2012 and 1700 participants in 2017
Bullet points in presentations are sometimes hard to understand without context.
Ad Hoc Residential exemption survey could be used for potential data points for the
comprehensive plan.
Economic development—Hartwell Avenue is just a part; think about other options as well;
tension around increasing building size; don't want to feel like it's a city.Need to find a balance.
Residential and commercial build-out scenarios—Hartwell presentation is located on the
Economic Development webpage of the town website.
Previous comprehensive plan—didn't want to change the proportion of commercial land used and
residential land used.
Residential values have increased greatly while, commercial values increased only moderately—
commercial value increased 5X; residential value IOX
Planning Staff should look into getting information from the Town's census data.
************ School Enrollment Trends************
Lexington public school enrollment of Grades K-5 have dropped in the last few years
Multi-Cohort Progression Model
Planning staff should send trend presentations to the Committee before the next meeting so that
the Committee may review slides in advance.
Stake holders can be invited to come to the meeting.
**********
The meeting adjourned at 9:06 PM.
Prepared by Stacey Beuttell