By Scott Monroe
PUD and PRD. Ridgeline and hillside and fluvial erosion hazard overlay districts. Conditional change of use and clearcutting. Ingress and egress, curbcut and greenbelt, viewsheds and screening and watercourses and setbacks and dwelling units. And don’t forget density requirements and applicable lot coverage.
Um, what?
If you don’t know what most of those terms mean, I don’t blame you. It’s a sampling of many words I’ve become familiar with these last four and a half years as a reporter covering and writing about development.
It’s what I call zoning-speak: a specialized language used by the development and zoning community.
When I started at the Stowe Reporter, understanding these terms was a big challenge. In fact, it was a barrier. Who were these people talking in code and pointing long sticks at complicated, multilayered maps? Why can’t they say, “driveway,” “grass,” “road,” and “house”?
I’ve learned a lot in four and a half years. That’s not to say I’m a zoning expert today; I’m most certainly not. But I now know enough to be able decode most of the zoning-speak and, more importantly, explain it.
One of the most important jobs for a reporter is to be able to translate, to be an interpreter of these foreign languages. It’s not just zoning. Town government has its own language of invented, bureaucratic words and acronyms — “net budget,” “RFP,” and “fee schedule” come to mind.
So, too, does the news biz have its own language; inside our building here at 49 School St. you’ll hear us toss around many gems — “PDFing,” “Quark page,” “heds, subheds, dropheds, deckheds, overlines, leading, slugs, newshole, nut graf, lede, dingbats” and on and on.
When it comes to development, I’m aiming to translate zoning-speak into plain English for all our readers. I’m using common words instead of “specialized” ones.
A “greenbelt,” I have learned, is not an advanced level of martial arts; it’s a strip of grass. A “viewshed” is not an old lean-to in the back yard that contains hanging art; it’s what you can see from a particular direction.
And then there are the many, many acronyms. PUD stands for planned unit development; it’s land that’s developed in a single project, usually for commercial purposes, such as new a cluster of new buildings for stores and restaurants. There’s also a Ski PUD that applies to specifically to Stowe Mountain Resort. The PUD is not to be confused with PRD, a planned residential development (also known as a residential planned unit development), which focuses on the development of houses, condos or apartments in a single project.
When I wrote this week about the town’s zoning regulation overhaul I tried to take the code language and explain it simply. This particular story was easier than most; it focused mostly on parking and traffic issues and was based on a public hearing.
Most of the proposed zoning changes were approved this week. By clicking on that link, you can read Stowe’s zoning-speak in all of its glory in the 180-page zoning regulations. Have fun. Don’t operate heavy machinery while reading.
Plenty of zoning stories I’ve written have required a fair amount of translation. Issues of site density, internal and external setbacks, and buffer zones are pretty tough to explain short and simply.
Take “Piecasso plans slip on grass” from May 17, 2007. The issue, as I saw it, was that the Development Review Board was “concerned about loss of grassy space for parking” at the Piecasso restaurant, which planned an expansion of its seating and parking lot. That’s not exactly what the review board members said, but that’s basically what they meant when they bemoaned the elimination of “green space” and a “greenbelt” that served as a “buffer” for adjacent properties.
Complicating matters was the parking lot, the mathematical formulas involved, and how many parking spaces the restaurant needs. Zoning rules spell that out — one space for every three seats in the restaurant, plus one space for each person employed at the restaurant during the busiest times. The rules also allow the board to require more — or less — off-street parking than is normally required if there’s a “special condition” or “unique usage” to the property.
And here’s a doozy: “With approval of the (Development Review Board) the actual construction of parking spaces in lots requiring 50 or more parking spaces may be reduced by 20 percent. … All calculations shall be rounded up to the next whole number.”
Oh, yeah, and if there are “multiple uses” at the establishment, “the parking requirements may be reduced at the discretion” of the review board.
I can’t remember exactly, but I think the discussion of these various formulas and terms went on for at least one or two hours at the Development Review Board hearing.
And after all that talk about the parking lot, I decided on this explanation: Piecasso needed 64 spaces and eventually updated its plans to have 65. And the restaurant added more grass and trees to its plans.
How’s that for translation?
6/27/08
6/23/08
Change is fast and furious
by Marina Knight
By the time I finish writing this, something to do with our job as newspaper people will have changed.
Many have heard the news and seen the headlines – newspapers are suffering, readership is dwindling and publishers around the country are in a panic. Big papers like the New York Times are in turmoil – they recently closed all their suburban bureaus and now have one reporter covering all of New Jersey. They are trying to figure out how to re-capture their audience and make themselves relevant again.
I was reading a paper online recently and it referred to its print version as the “dead-wood” version.
The times are changing and changing fast. The “newspaper” or print template for feeding people information used to be effective, but the truth is that a newspaper can only provide people with a fraction of the information they need nowadays.
Simply telling people what is news is not enough and the Internet – particularly the precedent that’s been set by the speed at which people can find out information – has changed everything.
So, what we are trying to do, just like everyone else in this business, is paddle in hard to catch the wave that is cresting high overhead. If we don’t we’ll surely be smashed to the bottom and given a good tumble before we come back up sputtering for air.
Actually, the picture for us is not nearly as grim as it is for some other papers. The Stowe Reporter is doing well, we have not seen a decline in circulation and print ad revenue is healthy. Last year we started a newspaper in Waterbury, which I am sure puts us in very lonely company.
But while things are good, we recognize the change that’s upon us so we’re making a big effort to grow our online presence (www.stowetoday.com) in the community and become not just a news provider but the local information and connectivity utility.
While the majority of what we’ll continue to provide is local news coverage, news is just one the jobs we need to do now. This is a big change.
We are asking ourselves tough but tremendously exciting questions: What can we as a newspaper company become? How can we utilize the Internet to meet people’s current needs for information and connection to our community? How can we continue to remain relevant?
By the time I finish writing this, something to do with our job as newspaper people will have changed.
Many have heard the news and seen the headlines – newspapers are suffering, readership is dwindling and publishers around the country are in a panic. Big papers like the New York Times are in turmoil – they recently closed all their suburban bureaus and now have one reporter covering all of New Jersey. They are trying to figure out how to re-capture their audience and make themselves relevant again.
I was reading a paper online recently and it referred to its print version as the “dead-wood” version.
The times are changing and changing fast. The “newspaper” or print template for feeding people information used to be effective, but the truth is that a newspaper can only provide people with a fraction of the information they need nowadays.
Simply telling people what is news is not enough and the Internet – particularly the precedent that’s been set by the speed at which people can find out information – has changed everything.
So, what we are trying to do, just like everyone else in this business, is paddle in hard to catch the wave that is cresting high overhead. If we don’t we’ll surely be smashed to the bottom and given a good tumble before we come back up sputtering for air.
Actually, the picture for us is not nearly as grim as it is for some other papers. The Stowe Reporter is doing well, we have not seen a decline in circulation and print ad revenue is healthy. Last year we started a newspaper in Waterbury, which I am sure puts us in very lonely company.
But while things are good, we recognize the change that’s upon us so we’re making a big effort to grow our online presence (www.stowetoday.com) in the community and become not just a news provider but the local information and connectivity utility.
While the majority of what we’ll continue to provide is local news coverage, news is just one the jobs we need to do now. This is a big change.
We are asking ourselves tough but tremendously exciting questions: What can we as a newspaper company become? How can we utilize the Internet to meet people’s current needs for information and connection to our community? How can we continue to remain relevant?
6/17/08
Two little stories about my move to Stowe
BY BIDDLE DUKE
Let’s get something clear. I didn’t move to Stowe. I bought the Stowe Reporter.
That was an important distinction — more so then, when we made the move, and I was only 35 and in the middle of a newspaper career and my working life. I wasn’t retiring to the good life in a quaint resort town in Vermont. I had found a newspaper I could afford. That it was in a beautiful community with a sound economy and decent economic prospects and a great school sealed the deal, which went down May 1, 1998.
I remember when in March of that year I went to Peter Manigault, the chairman of the Evening Post Publishing Co. He’d been my mentor and my friend and he’d invested almost five years in me, teaching me much about business, journalism, life and friendship.
Peter was stunned by my choice. I was leaving his company of many newspapers and TV stations, where I had terrific prospects, and his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, a place that people want to move to, not away from, to buy a tiny newspaper with middling prospects and cold winters.
“You want to spend the next 10 years fleecing ski bunnies from Boston and New York?” he said in his halting manner.
Once I was in the saddle here, the questions from neighbors, most of whom I would discover had some economic connection to my new venture — as advertisers, readers, employees — were more rhetorical: “How did you decide on Stowe?”
I didn’t. Stowe had little to do with it. That response, of course, is not what most people imagined or probably what they wanted to hear. Most folks live here by circumstance or choice and people are comforted when the choices of others confirm their own. But I wasn’t going to do that. I moved to Stowe to run the newspaper; that it was located in a terrifically cool place just made that prospect more appealing.
It bears mentioning that one of the other papers I’d looked at was in Libby, Montana. I’d have moved there in a heartbeat for all the reasons that people are moving away. W.R. Grace’s vermiculite mine had contaminated the town and the paper was leading the charge against the big, bad corporation. If it wasn’t, it sure would have under my ownership. (W.R. Grace was eventually brought down by the Libby case).
My wife smacked away that idea. Who was I kidding? Moving our family to Montana was a stretch, but moving to a toxic mining town was a joke not even worth considering.
So Idoline, a UVM grad, greeted the prospect of Stowe like an oasis in the parched desert. Then we visited, saw that it was really nice — that the entire state of Vermont is an oasis — and made the decision that, yes, I could proceed with negotiations to purchase the Stowe Reporter.
Which I did.
And I’m sure glad I didn’t ruin my marriage and my health and move to Libby. I would never have discovered, 10 years later, what a great excuse buying the Reporter gave me for moving to Stowe and Vermont.
•••
The other story is tangential.
When we moved here, we didn’t waste any time finding a house, which is emblematic of how we approached this move: It was all business. We weren’t necessarily looking for the perfect home. It just had to work.
At the end of one day of searching, we spotted something in the window of McKee Real Estate, Brent Libby’s operation that is now the Sotheby’s affiliate on Mountain Road.
Brent was in. The house was up the street and we could see it right away. We went.
Other than being smack on the road, the house was ideal and in many ways picture perfect. And in our price range: $292,000. Four bedrooms, a pond, 2 acres, two old barns, within biking distance of town and schools.
We made an offer on the spot. Sold.
Of course, being all business, I went right to work on the house’s first problem: that cars were flying by some 10 yards from the front door. Within the first few weeks of moving in, I called and introduced myself to the very congenial police chief and explained my problem to him.
Ken Kaplan replied: “I’ll send a cruiser up there. That should slow people down.”
Genius, I thought. I like this town. The chief’s on my side.
Sure enough, one of the officers pulled right in to my driveway and parked facing the road. Pretty soon, he pulled out with his flashers on and pulled someone over.
Sonofagun, I thought, that’ll slow ’em down. Then another and another.
For the next few weeks, people were damn careful driving by my house. Those speeders. That showed ’em.
A few months later, a nice man I know threw a party for me. One of my neighbors, Chip Percy, attended, along with a bunch of other Percys. To be a Percy in Stowe is like being a Kennedy in Massachusetts — they own tons of land and businesses and are speckled throughout local government.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I appreciated the way you introduced yourself to your neighbors,” said Chip. “You had the cops saying your hellos for you.”
What do you say at moments like that?
What I said was “Oh, darn. Sorry. I didn’t know they would issue tickets.” Which was the truth.
And all credit to Chip for pointing it out, clear and simple, the first time we met. He laughs now at the memory of what a dumbbell I was, and he’ll have that on me till I die.
What I didn’t know then and what I understand so well today is that almost nothing you do in a town of 5,000 or so is a secret. Which is pretty slow thinking for a newspaper publisher. But while I’d spent 15 years working and running newspapers, I really didn’t know what I was getting into when I took over the Stowe Reporter and moved, yes, moved, to Stowe, Vermont.
Let’s get something clear. I didn’t move to Stowe. I bought the Stowe Reporter.
That was an important distinction — more so then, when we made the move, and I was only 35 and in the middle of a newspaper career and my working life. I wasn’t retiring to the good life in a quaint resort town in Vermont. I had found a newspaper I could afford. That it was in a beautiful community with a sound economy and decent economic prospects and a great school sealed the deal, which went down May 1, 1998.
I remember when in March of that year I went to Peter Manigault, the chairman of the Evening Post Publishing Co. He’d been my mentor and my friend and he’d invested almost five years in me, teaching me much about business, journalism, life and friendship.
Peter was stunned by my choice. I was leaving his company of many newspapers and TV stations, where I had terrific prospects, and his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, a place that people want to move to, not away from, to buy a tiny newspaper with middling prospects and cold winters.
“You want to spend the next 10 years fleecing ski bunnies from Boston and New York?” he said in his halting manner.
Once I was in the saddle here, the questions from neighbors, most of whom I would discover had some economic connection to my new venture — as advertisers, readers, employees — were more rhetorical: “How did you decide on Stowe?”
I didn’t. Stowe had little to do with it. That response, of course, is not what most people imagined or probably what they wanted to hear. Most folks live here by circumstance or choice and people are comforted when the choices of others confirm their own. But I wasn’t going to do that. I moved to Stowe to run the newspaper; that it was located in a terrifically cool place just made that prospect more appealing.
It bears mentioning that one of the other papers I’d looked at was in Libby, Montana. I’d have moved there in a heartbeat for all the reasons that people are moving away. W.R. Grace’s vermiculite mine had contaminated the town and the paper was leading the charge against the big, bad corporation. If it wasn’t, it sure would have under my ownership. (W.R. Grace was eventually brought down by the Libby case).
My wife smacked away that idea. Who was I kidding? Moving our family to Montana was a stretch, but moving to a toxic mining town was a joke not even worth considering.
So Idoline, a UVM grad, greeted the prospect of Stowe like an oasis in the parched desert. Then we visited, saw that it was really nice — that the entire state of Vermont is an oasis — and made the decision that, yes, I could proceed with negotiations to purchase the Stowe Reporter.
Which I did.
And I’m sure glad I didn’t ruin my marriage and my health and move to Libby. I would never have discovered, 10 years later, what a great excuse buying the Reporter gave me for moving to Stowe and Vermont.
•••
The other story is tangential.
When we moved here, we didn’t waste any time finding a house, which is emblematic of how we approached this move: It was all business. We weren’t necessarily looking for the perfect home. It just had to work.
At the end of one day of searching, we spotted something in the window of McKee Real Estate, Brent Libby’s operation that is now the Sotheby’s affiliate on Mountain Road.
Brent was in. The house was up the street and we could see it right away. We went.
Other than being smack on the road, the house was ideal and in many ways picture perfect. And in our price range: $292,000. Four bedrooms, a pond, 2 acres, two old barns, within biking distance of town and schools.
We made an offer on the spot. Sold.
Of course, being all business, I went right to work on the house’s first problem: that cars were flying by some 10 yards from the front door. Within the first few weeks of moving in, I called and introduced myself to the very congenial police chief and explained my problem to him.
Ken Kaplan replied: “I’ll send a cruiser up there. That should slow people down.”
Genius, I thought. I like this town. The chief’s on my side.
Sure enough, one of the officers pulled right in to my driveway and parked facing the road. Pretty soon, he pulled out with his flashers on and pulled someone over.
Sonofagun, I thought, that’ll slow ’em down. Then another and another.
For the next few weeks, people were damn careful driving by my house. Those speeders. That showed ’em.
A few months later, a nice man I know threw a party for me. One of my neighbors, Chip Percy, attended, along with a bunch of other Percys. To be a Percy in Stowe is like being a Kennedy in Massachusetts — they own tons of land and businesses and are speckled throughout local government.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I appreciated the way you introduced yourself to your neighbors,” said Chip. “You had the cops saying your hellos for you.”
What do you say at moments like that?
What I said was “Oh, darn. Sorry. I didn’t know they would issue tickets.” Which was the truth.
And all credit to Chip for pointing it out, clear and simple, the first time we met. He laughs now at the memory of what a dumbbell I was, and he’ll have that on me till I die.
What I didn’t know then and what I understand so well today is that almost nothing you do in a town of 5,000 or so is a secret. Which is pretty slow thinking for a newspaper publisher. But while I’d spent 15 years working and running newspapers, I really didn’t know what I was getting into when I took over the Stowe Reporter and moved, yes, moved, to Stowe, Vermont.
6/10/08
Why the latte factor is all froth
By Lisa McCormack
Financial prosperity is all about the latte factor; just buy fewer lattes, invest the money you save and you’ll retire rich.
Ask the financial gurus who smugly share their wisdom on Oprah and write books with titles like “Everyone Can be a Millionaire” and they’ll tell you it comes down to living beneath your means and controlling your discretionary spending. In other words: If you can’t make ends meet, it’s your fault.
But that philosophy appears to be all froth, at least here in Vermont, where gasoline has hit the $4 mark, home heating oil is hovering around $5 a gallon and grocery prices are escalating so rapidly that even weekly specials and double-coupon deals don’t help much.
Given that the median household income in Vermont was $47,665 in 2006, most would still struggle to fill their gas tanks and heat their homes even if they swore off lattes forever.
The reaction generated by an article I wrote last week about roiling home fuel prices brings my point home.
Heating fuel dealers I interviewed for the article were still crunching the numbers to determine if they should offer pre-buy plans, and if so, how much should they charge. One dealer said his customers “should prepare to be shocked” when they received their new contracts.
The subject came up Sunday at a barbecue I attended. Within our group were service workers, state employees, a social worker, business owners. retirees, and a recently laid-off single mother.
Although the weather was a steamy 90 degrees, all voiced a common concern: How would they be able to heat their homes this winter?
Most have already cut back their spending this year. They’ve eliminated family vacations. They’ve curtailed shopping trips to Burlington and road trips to visit out-of-state relatives. They’re eating less meat and forgoing takeout pizza and Chinese food in favor of an occasional potluck with friends.
Vermonters are resourceful people and my friends are finding extra money wherever they can. One man whose construction business has sputtered as real estate prices have cooled started a lawn-mowing business. A woman with four kids ages six and under has started a home daycare business to boast her family income.
Those who used to spend their weekends at yard sales are scouring their basements and barns for anything they can do without and are holding their own yard sales to generate some quick cash.
My friends who garden are planting extra rows to freeze and can and a few who have never gardened have planted backyard plots.
These days, financial survival isn’t about cutting back on lattes, or fancy vacations or other luxuries. It’s about stretching already thin paychecks to cover the escalating costs of essentials: fuel, food, heat.
Most at the barbecue were hopeful that things would eventually turn around. My friend, Anne, was laid off from her manufacturing job several months ago. She has sent out a few dozen resumes and is optimistic that she will find work in the service sector soon as the local resorts gear up for the summer tourism season.
“In the meantime, I try to look on the bright side, she said. “At least I don’t have to worry about not having enough gas to get to work.”
Financial prosperity is all about the latte factor; just buy fewer lattes, invest the money you save and you’ll retire rich.
Ask the financial gurus who smugly share their wisdom on Oprah and write books with titles like “Everyone Can be a Millionaire” and they’ll tell you it comes down to living beneath your means and controlling your discretionary spending. In other words: If you can’t make ends meet, it’s your fault.
But that philosophy appears to be all froth, at least here in Vermont, where gasoline has hit the $4 mark, home heating oil is hovering around $5 a gallon and grocery prices are escalating so rapidly that even weekly specials and double-coupon deals don’t help much.
Given that the median household income in Vermont was $47,665 in 2006, most would still struggle to fill their gas tanks and heat their homes even if they swore off lattes forever.
The reaction generated by an article I wrote last week about roiling home fuel prices brings my point home.
Heating fuel dealers I interviewed for the article were still crunching the numbers to determine if they should offer pre-buy plans, and if so, how much should they charge. One dealer said his customers “should prepare to be shocked” when they received their new contracts.
The subject came up Sunday at a barbecue I attended. Within our group were service workers, state employees, a social worker, business owners. retirees, and a recently laid-off single mother.
Although the weather was a steamy 90 degrees, all voiced a common concern: How would they be able to heat their homes this winter?
Most have already cut back their spending this year. They’ve eliminated family vacations. They’ve curtailed shopping trips to Burlington and road trips to visit out-of-state relatives. They’re eating less meat and forgoing takeout pizza and Chinese food in favor of an occasional potluck with friends.
Vermonters are resourceful people and my friends are finding extra money wherever they can. One man whose construction business has sputtered as real estate prices have cooled started a lawn-mowing business. A woman with four kids ages six and under has started a home daycare business to boast her family income.
Those who used to spend their weekends at yard sales are scouring their basements and barns for anything they can do without and are holding their own yard sales to generate some quick cash.
My friends who garden are planting extra rows to freeze and can and a few who have never gardened have planted backyard plots.
These days, financial survival isn’t about cutting back on lattes, or fancy vacations or other luxuries. It’s about stretching already thin paychecks to cover the escalating costs of essentials: fuel, food, heat.
Most at the barbecue were hopeful that things would eventually turn around. My friend, Anne, was laid off from her manufacturing job several months ago. She has sent out a few dozen resumes and is optimistic that she will find work in the service sector soon as the local resorts gear up for the summer tourism season.
“In the meantime, I try to look on the bright side, she said. “At least I don’t have to worry about not having enough gas to get to work.”
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