Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

four. So let's get the meeting started because we have a big agenda item tonight. And since the beginning of the meeting is mostly formalities anyway, I'm sure Liz will join in a minute. So welcome, everybody, to the June 16, 2026 Chappell Planning Commission meeting. We are a, and there's Liz, we are a volunteer citizen advisory board charged with advising the town council, not making decisions, but advising the town council on matters of orderly growth and development. And we'll start out with a roll call before doing some other administrative matters, and we'll quickly get to our main agenda item for tonight. So we'll start out with a roll call. Jeff?

Present.

Liz? yes chuck here mike i'm here and i'm john mitchell the chair are there any um announcements actually i'm doing the order wrong apparently we're going to do approval of the agenda first um so we have one um item of new business beyond just approving the minutes from the last meeting. And that's a presentation from the planning department from TAS regarding, um, the LUMO, the land use management ordinance. That's a discussion item and that's, that's all we have for tonight, but, uh, might take a little bit. Um, is everybody okay with the agenda? If you're okay, if you could, um, just thumbs up if I can see you or, uh, yeah, I think I can see everybody. Yeah. So looks like we're fine with the agenda. Announcements and petitions, and I think, Jeff, this was a chance where you could maybe give us an update on the Carolina North meeting.

Yes. Thanks, John. I was appointed to the Carolina North Stakeholder Advisory Committee, not in my capacity as a Planning Commission member, but just as a community member. So I thought I would just report out every time there's a meeting and share anything interesting that happened. So it was about a two-hour meeting. There are about 36 members or so on the Stakeholder Advisory Committee. There's a website at carolinanorthunc.edu that provides the name of all the members as well as meeting agendas. There supposedly will be minutes, which I assume will approve at the next meeting, and the video of the meeting itself should be on there as well. It was very much an introductory meeting. Everybody introduced themselves. We got a brief overview, introduction from the chancellor, a brief overview of the project and the timeline. They have consultants doing a study of place to sort of, you know, get some basic elements of how the site might be developed. And then they have a team led by the consulting firm Air St. Grosse that helped the university develop its master plan a couple of years ago. I believe they did the previous master plan from about 12 years ago or so, and they do a lot of work with institutions around the country doing campus . They'll be getting on board, and the goal is to have that study, I think, completed within about a year or so. Their timetable has at least some horizontal construction taking place sometime in 2027. Not a lot of details, questions. There was a News & Observer article about the meeting. One of them, some of the questions that were raised, someone asked about the status of a basketball arena on Carolina North and that has still not been decided, although it's important. And there were comments about making sure that Carolina North is welcoming to the community. also making sure that the trail system is maintained and really improved because a lot of them are pretty fragile and there was concern about how they will hold up if there's an entire campus there that's using the trails. So that's about it. No decisions made. This is not a committee that will make decisions, but it's an interesting and diverse group and see what happens.

Thanks, Jeff. Taz, I wonder if you could help us get an invite to this meeting to Council Member McCullough, who can't find an invite and is having trouble receiving, and her Council email invites forwarded from us.

Yeah, so for this, like, for her to join.

Yeah, she wants to join the meeting we're having right now, but we're just having trouble getting her a link that gets to the spam filter.

Got it. Yeah, give me just a second. Let me see what I can do.

Okay, thank you. Liz, did you have a question for Jeff?

I had a question for Jeff, and then I also had an announcement. The question for Jeff is – sorry, Jeff, I might have missed. You said this. Who does the committee answer to? I just missed that. You probably said it right at the beginning.

I didn't, but the – Or who called it? It reports to the chancellor.

Got it. Okay. Interesting. Great. Great. And so on a different topic, although I will stop if anybody had any other questions or comments about what Jeff just brought up. Okay. John, maybe you were going to say this already, but just wanted to mention that in the last council meeting, John and my terms were extended by one year. So just wanted to note for the record that this is not the last date of our terms. John, did you want to add anything to that?

No, that escaped my mind. So thank you for bringing that up. Um, are there other announcements or petitions from doesn't look like we have any numbers of the public, um, or from planning commission members. If not, we can go forward to approval of the minutes from the last meeting. Um, oh, by the way, thank you, Jeff, for the update. And, uh, yeah, please do. I'd love to get more of these going forward. Um, May 19th minutes attached to the agenda. I took a look. They looked accurate to me. If you guys agree, maybe somebody could motion to approve.

Motion.

Second. Wow.

Let Josh figure that out, Art.

Yeah, that would be a puzzle. Procedural crisis, simultaneous motion and second. Okay. Thumbs up if you're okay with minutes. Yes. Minutes are approved. And now we are going to proceed to new business. I just want to note that there are two of me on the call, and I think that's because Melissa dialed in with a dial-in that I forwarded her, which is the one that I had. But Taz, if it's possible to get Melissa a more generic invite, maybe she could dial in with that. But I'm fine having two of me. Maybe she'd be a better representation of me than I am myself anyway.

Melissa could also change the name. Melissa, the little dots on the top right allow you to rename yourself.

There you go.

I don't seem to have that, but don't worry about me.

Magic. I did it. Oh, perfect.

Okay. So with that, let me turn it over to TAS to present to us on the LUMO. And TAS, before you speak, let me just see if there's any, I don't see any members of the public, but in case, for the record, members of the public want to join us or join us midstream, the plan is to have TAS give his whole presentation and then have public comment and then go back to the Planning Commission for a combined question and comment session by by segment, and there are five segments corresponding to the objectives in the alignment memo. But I'm kind of thinking, Taz, that given that we don't have any members of the public dialed in, maybe we just pause, you know, at the end of each of the five segments and have Planning Commission comment and questions just to break it up and give you a little rest from your presentation.

Yeah, I think that would be great. Um, and if you, um, need to jump in more often than that, I think that would be perfect as well. Um, full disclosure, the presentation has topped out at like well over 50 slides. So, um, I think the more y'all want to and need to interject, I think the better, um, can make this more of a discussion.

Okay, fine, but the default, we'll just leave it to you to sort of pause and prompt us and we'll go from there. Sure, sounds good. Thank you.

All right, well, I can go ahead and jump in. I appreciate you guys. Preemptively, I appreciate your patience this evening and your time. I think it's going to be a meaningful discussion, albeit a long one. Give me just a second here. I'll get my screen share going. Okay. Are you all seeing my shared screen?

Yes.

Okay. I want to just talk through a handful of things this evening before jumping into kind of the substance of the conversation. I want to briefly talk about what public participation over the summer and into the fall is going to look like. And then also what starts to kind of give you guys a sense of what your schedule and the council's schedule in the fall could potentially look like. And then we'll jump into the meat of the conversation around the substance of the draft ordinance. So first off with public participation, just want to kind of set out that I think from the outset, we've really talked about public participation with this project being primarily about education, right? Making sure that the public understands what's in the draft ordinance. and understands their opportunities to kind of speak to the kind of final decision makers in this process, which is gonna be planning commission and council. And so with those goals in mind, we're gonna work with our communications and engagement department to really come up with a good mix of in-person events and online outreach to kind of get the word out right to make sure that people once we have a draft ordinance uh available to the public uh make sure that they are able to access it easily comment on it learn more about what's in it and then also just be set up well to to participate in the public process in the fall And then we're also going to be doing some kind of more detailed user testing with kind of key stakeholders just have more technical technical understanding of how land use ordinances work. We really want to make sure that the people that are going to be using LUMO day in and day out get a chance to kind of roll up their sleeves with it. And so that's kind of generally what public participation is going to look like over the summer and going into the fall. And we'll start to share more information as the draft LUMO gets published, hopefully within the next couple of weeks. And then really kind of moving on from there. One other thing that I'll just mention that's not on the slide is that even after this meeting, I'm not going anywhere for the summer. I wanna be a resource, other staff wanna be a resource to you guys, as you all are kind of digging into the draft LUMO for the first time. So we had talked about this notion of basically doing office hours throughout the summer, and that's very much an open offer. If any planning commission members, if you have a question about what's in the draft LUMO, if you just wanna sit down for 30 minutes or an hour, At any time, just reach out and we can make that happen. So again, it's an opportunity for you to better understand what's in the LUMO, not necessarily, you know, workshopping what's in the LUMO, but making sure that you're well equipped to engage with the ordinance throughout the rest of the year. And it really is going to be kind of the rest of the year that we're going to be working with the draft ordinance. We have put together a schedule that potentially gives you all in council the opportunity to adopt the new LUMO by the end of the year. And in doing that, right, we have to balance kind of a sense of urgency, but also what we know is an interest of you all on council, which is to have kind of a deliberative discussion about the new LUMO. And so with that, I mean, yeah. particularly council can always add additional meetings to the schedule that we've proposed, but additional meetings are likely going to come with additional time. There's not a lot of kind of room in the schedule as is to infill, right? It's kind of extend the timeline out into the, probably into 2027 if we add additional meetings. And so again, just kind of give you a sense of what, the schedule's gonna look like. We're really hoping to break it up into two phases, right? We know that there's been a lot of good opportunities to have kind of informal but still public discussions about the new LUMO. And so we're gonna have kind of a phase of work sessions and then lead into the official legislative process. So what you'll see in the yellow at the top of the screen are basically an opportunity for two planning commission work sessions and then two council work sessions with kind of contingency plans to add a third council meeting and a third planning commission meeting if needed. And what we're roughly proposing is that we would continue to use the five kind of key topic areas from the alignment memo and really dig in a little bit deeper in each of those work sessions.

Those work sessions, yeah. Are you going to share this presentation with us, not just so we have access to your timeline, et cetera, and kind of for review purposes later? Is that okay? Oh, 100%.

Yeah, I'll send the full deck over.

Okay, perfect. Thank you.

My first thing in the morning, yeah. um but yeah so there's going to be these these opportunities for kind of again informal albeit still uh public meetings um how we all choose to format those meetings is is really up to you all um we kind of colloquially refer them refer to them as work sessions but um if planning commission wants to take public comment at those meetings um that's certainly your your prerogative So we roll from those work sessions. You'll notice there's ideally, right, if you don't include these kind of contingency options, there's a good amount of time between the last planning commission work session and the start of the official kind of legislative process. There's also just a little bit of time between the last planning council work session and the start of the official legislative process. So we really want to create a little bit of space, a little bit of an opportunity for, again, the work sessions to set up a really good, efficient legislative process. And then what we have mapped out for the legislative process is kind of the bare minimum, right? planning commission meeting and two council hearings this can always expand we've built in some contingency options just based on availability of dates in at the end of the year but again if planning commission needs more time if council needs more time and always extend into into the new year before i jump into kind of the substance of the conversation around the alignment memo. Any questions on public participation or the schedule?

Liz? About when do you think we're going to get the draft, just to give us time to prepare for August 18?

Yeah, the draft is coming within the next couple of weeks. We are kind of putting final kind of touches of quality assurance, quality control, that kind of thing on it before we send it out to the public. But we're looking for the next couple of weeks. So ideally, you guys are going to have at least a month and a half with it to get to know it really well before you start talking about it in public. And I'll be there for, I think I've got one vacation plan, but other than that, I'll be around and available to chat whenever y'all need.

Great. Taz, is there any process to allow the draft to be a cloud-based draft so everyone can see everyone's comments, feedbacks, to reduce the workload on YouTube from the amount of feedbacks that you may get that may be duplicate?

Yeah, that's a really good question, Mike, and you've kind of forecast what we're intending to do. Our goal and the contract with the vendor isn't like the I's haven't been dotted and the T's haven't been crossed yet. I don't want to guarantee that we'll put it out on this platform, but our intent is to put it out on a platform that allows everybody to view the document and comment you know, wherever they want on the document. I think we still have to decide whether or not everybody will be able to see each other's comments or not. But that's a feature that could be toggled on and off. So we definitely want that to be as open of a process as possible.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah, I just wanted to make a comment and just to harp on my, one of my causes for the last few months is that the August 16th and September 1st meetings will be sort of the first meetings at which the final LUMO or the proposed final LUMO will be presented to a body. And then obviously the October 6th planning commission hearing, I strongly suggest those need to be in the council chambers.

Yeah, thank you, Jeff. And we'll definitely work to make that possible, if at all possible.

Jeff, the only problem with that is that at least the August 8th, I'm not planning to be on vacation, but a lot of people are out of town on that day and would probably be willing to take an evening out. But won't actually be in Chapel Hill. I will be here. So I would, but just, you know, at least for the planning commission, we might want to, and for staff, we might want to just make sure everyone's going to be there before we make that one in person.

Well, let's do a straw poll. So I will be in town. Mike, Chuck, and Jeff will be.

Okay. Well, then it's not a problem.

Mike and Chuck, will you guys be in town?

I have... Grandpa duty, so meaning that I don't know if I'm in Wilmington or local, but it could be, I think, a joint in-person and online, right? It could be. I don't think we have the capability to do that.

It's one or the other.

Yeah. Oh, yeah? Okay. Yeah, I can't. I don't know if I'm in Wilmington or I'm in local, okay, on August 18th. But September 1st? September 1st? I'm definitely in town. Okay. Chuck, what about you?

I assume I'll be around.

Okay. And I can check with Libby afterwards. We'll talk about it behind the scenes, Jeff and Taz. Thank you. Make sure we can get a quarrel.

All right, well, thank you guys for talking through the participation and the schedule for the fall. So next is, you know, I guess, settle in. We'll potentially be here for a while talking through the next part of this presentation. I want to really dig into the document that was shared with you all last week, the council alignment memo. The goal of that memo is to really outline how the policy guidance that the Council has provided over the last several years of discussions on LUMO, how that policy guidance can be translated into a regulatory framework. And it's the sort of work that I think as a lot of y'all have seen kind of deliberations about various land use mechanisms and standards and provisions, the sort of work that relies on a lot of different sources. Staff obviously have kind of a level of baked in expertise, not only on, you know, the local kind of on the ground conditions, but just best practices and planning more generally. We rely on and work with consultants that have experience in a much broader field, right? Geographically working with communities across the country, including other communities in North Carolina. And so we're pulling on the expertise of a lot of different people and not just planners, right? We're kind of drawing on the expertise of other disciplines within the town. We're looking at how other communities in North Carolina are dealing with kind of similar problems. And all of that, coupled with council's policy guidance, allows us to kind of collectively kind of distill things down into this regulatory framework. Everything that's on the table today is kind of a set of options, right? there is there is an opportunity um to kind of dial things up or down um or to ask that we rethink certain elements of the ordinance um ultimately right this is this is an effort in translating policy guidance into a regulatory framework and so i want to do is uh just kind of provide a little bit of context right so um the alignment memo that we shared builds on a discussion that we had with council back in april in which they identified three kind of overarching interests which were complete community sustainability and equity and then within those overarching interests are kind of under the umbrella of those overarching interests they identified five key interests. And so the Council Memo, as you all have seen, builds on that framework and talks about how the new LUMO is going to potentially meet those different key interests. And of course, as Liz asked about earlier, Lineman memo is an opportunity to talk about things at a high level now, but in just a couple of weeks, y'all are gonna be seeing kind of the full thing, right? And can really dig into the nitty gritty and the details in the draft. And so here's five key interests that council identified, user friendliness, housing, diversity, attainability and supply, economic development and land use, the built environment and public realm, and environment and resilience. where the alignment memo starts to get into much more detail is that under each of these five key interests council identified even more specific interests and so what we'll spend the next couple hours talking through is is how the new lumo is going to meet each of those specific interests that are housed within each of these five more general interests so we'll just kind of get moving along and like I said, please feel free to jump in with questions at any point. The goal is really to get y'all's feedback and understand the extent to which basically you believe the draft based on these kind of high level descriptions is kind of answering the call, right? Is the draft responsive to the policy guidance that the council and you all have provided over the last several years? So looking first at this question of user friendliness, council defined it as the notion that we improve the organization of LUMO and look at the town's administrative processes. So it's both kind of a Scrivener's exercise, right? Making sure that LUMO is just a well-functioning document, but also that our actual land use decision processes make sense and work for for the town. So within this kind of user-friendliness category, Council identified several more specific interests. And I'll just kind of let them roll on the screen here for you all to take a look at. There are a lot here, and there's a little bit of, I think, overlap between between these six. And so what I would actually recommend is that we focus on a few of them, right? Items three and item five, but happy to talk through really any of them that y'all would like to. My recommendation would be to focus on three and five. Are there any others just kind of skimming the list that y'all wanna make sure that we definitely touch on?

Yes, there's just, this may fit under number one, but I wanted to ask a sort of very high level question, sort of a level setting question about how many zoning districts we currently have, and how many new ones we're proposing to add. I saw in the alignment memo there's one we're proposing to add around missing middle housing, but I was just trying to get my brain around Whether we're sunsetting any existing zoning districts in the sense of not propagating them in the zoning map in the future, sort of just letting them roll off, or whether we're largely sort of sticking with the ones we have, trying to adjust them through this process and like adding one.

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I don't know the final numbers, but I am fairly certain that when the dust settles, there will be fewer zoning districts than there are today. um there's going to be a spike in the number of zoning districts that are technically available for folks to use for the next little while kind of this interim period between whenever the new lumo is adopted and a new town-wide zoning map is adopted in that interim period you'll have all of the existing zoning districts still on the map, but then you'll also have all of the new zoning districts just in the text of the ordinance. And so then when the town goes through and adopts a new zoning map, there'll be a lot of translation, right? Kind of one-to-one, you know, here was your old zoning district, here's the corresponding new zoning district. A lot of the changes in the zoning map are gonna look like that. And then in kind of key areas, essentially like the focus areas identified by the future land use map, that's where we're likely to see more than just kind of a one to one translation between old zoning district and the corresponding new zoning district. For example, you have areas in some of our focus areas that are zoned for really like low density residential uses. And that's clearly out of step with what the focus area would call for. So this is an opportunity to make sure that there's stronger alignment between future land use map and the zoning map. So again, just to reiterate, we're going to see a spike in the number of available zoning districts during an interim period, and then things will kind of settle down once we get the new zoning map adopted.

Okay. I'm going to go to Jeff and Liz in a second, but I'm just going to try to repeat back to you what I think you were saying, and it's probably going to be wrong, so maybe you could just fix it. So I think you're saying that the new LUMO will have some modernized versions or sort of shadow versions of existing pre-existing zoning districts that that we're looking to eventually sort of supplant the old ones that are sort of like the equivalent new version it's just going to require the zoning map process to kind of sub it in where we want it and a lot of those legacy ones especially especially in lower density areas would be expected to essentially sunset after the new

um zoning map is that right yeah that's that's exactly right so and to just use an example um r1 residential one zoning district um we'll see some updated standards when the new lumo is adopted um but the new lumo is also going to create an r a zoning district and and eventually uh once we adopt a new zoning map that r1 would kind of get translated to an r a zoning district Okay, got it.

Jeff and then Liz.

Yeah, two things. One, it was a good question, John. I think I know the LUMO is not done, but it feels a little hiding the ball to not just say what the new districts are at this stage, you know, a table showing old districts and new districts. And I mean, I don't know that you want to, if you want to throw that into the presentation to council tomorrow, cause I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be surprised if they ask that at the very least, you know, if the LUMO itself doesn't have it some sort of a comparison table showing old districts to new districts would be helpful. But I did have a comment that preceded John's, which was, I just want to make sure I understand, you know, from a user friendliness and organizational perspective. It was almost exactly three years ago that council was presented with a memo with the table of contents of the new LOMO. Based on what I read and the discussions, is that no longer operative, that proposed structure of LUMO, and we shouldn't pay attention to it?

Yeah, that's right, and we should make sure that that's... clearly noted wherever that older document is available online. I think as many of you all know, we hit a pretty significant snag with the project a little over a year ago and had to switch consultant teams. And so the work, the kind of fundamental building blocks of the work product changed a lot. So with the new consultant team came kind of their own organization for the new LUMO. we will be working with a different table of contents than what was previously published.

Has my, I don't have a question, I have a request that seems most appropriate for this topic, but throughout. You mentioned in the beginning that the process of getting to where you are right now included a lot of looking at what other towns, communities, peer locations are doing, trying to get the best of, it would be helpful when you come to some of these, if there are some exemplar communities that you're really drawing from, if you mention them, that just help us if we want to go back and look and, you know, get a sense of how they're doing it. So if you just, as you're going along, if you can think of places to mention, hey, you know, Chatham or Ann Arbor or whatever, a place that you've drawn from.

Yeah, absolutely. I think we can, we can try to work that in. We can try to work that in. I can't make any, you know.

Yeah.

No, no. But yeah. I know you're about to present.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you. So Taz, I think fine to focus on your number three and number five on the screen for purposes of your presentation. The commissioners all have the alignment memo and I think we've read it. And so when it's convenient to stop for a comment at the end of this goal section, I think the commissioners should feel free to raise any questions they had on these pages of the presentation.

Yeah, absolutely. And happy to take questions on any of the slides, even if, or, you know, any of the slides are material, even if we don't cover it per se. And I should probably just mention that all the language that you're going to see on this presentation is pulled directly from the alignment memo. So if there's anything in the memo that you're interested in just kind of pointing to, we can go there. So I think one of the kind of most interesting specific interests under this user-friendliness key interest is this notion of streamlining development applications and review processes while ensuring that the administrative pathways still support complete community outcomes. And when we talk about administrative pathways, we're looking at staff approval, right? And administrative approval of a development project. And I think one of the key elements of complete community was this notion of kind of getting away from project by project decision making by council the idea kind of underlying complete community is that council is is most well suited to laying out kind of higher level policy goals um when it comes to land use the lumo is the best way to implement those goals and then allow the system to kind of go forth and do what it's supposed to do, right? Rather than counsel hearing more and more projects. So a lot of what we're going to talk about is an opportunity to kind of clean up some of our development review processes. I'll just note that a lot of major improvements were made earlier in the year with the omnibus text amendments. And this is just a set of options to kind of go even further than that. So the first proposal that we could see in the new LUMO is really taking the Blue Hill District and working to further streamline what that approval process looks like. Currently, projects in the Blue Hill District require kind of a two-step approval. They get a review and approval from the Community Design Commission through a process called a Certificate of Appropriateness. And then they also get a review and approval from the town manager through a process called a Form District Permit. And by and large, those two processes look at very similar things. They consider similar interests, they reflect similar and protect similar interests of the town. They are both technically administrative decisions. Even though the Community Design Commission is a public body, just like you all, the decision that they're making is administrative. And so you may see some parallels between the CDC's certificate of appropriateness process and Planning Commission's old site plan review process, where, again, a public body was making an administrative decision that was kind of repetitive of review by staff. And so what we're proposing is that um projects in the Blue Hill District would be able to move forward with just staff approval that the town manager would be responsible for both the form district permit and the certificate of appropriateness process I'll note and kind of highlighted one potential dynamic this sets up, highlighted it in the alignment memo, is that if the CDC were kind of relieved of its responsibilities for certificates of appropriateness, they wouldn't really be left with any significant development review responsibilities. There are essentially some kind of legacy responsibilities from older entitlements or approvals from town council. And so it does kind of beg the question of whether the CDC should be sunset if we kind of further streamline the Blue Hill permitting process, does the CDC still kind of, is there a value add to keeping that body active? So we move into significantly smaller scale topics after this one. One of the things we're looking to do to, again, kind of streamline permitting processes is to think about what sorts of activity doesn't even need a permit. We currently have a pretty significant exemption for residential projects. You know, as long as work in a single-family or two-family home doesn't exceed a certain amount of land disturbance, a certain amount of floor area, and is well outside of any sort of environmentally constrained areas, those projects are able to move forward without having to get a zoning compliance permit. And so what we're proposing is to apply basically those same metrics to commercial properties. And it fixes what's kind of a pretty burdensome set of regulations for any commercial developer in the area or any business owner in the area that by the letter of the law, if you own commercial property and you you technically require a zoning compliance permit. Essentially any land disturbance on commercial property triggers the need for a zoning compliance permit. And we've just found that there's an opportunity to, again, relieve some administrative burden on those kind of smaller end of the scale. And then last thing in this item, is again kind of rethinking who is making what decisions. What the new LUMO would propose is that the responsibility for new special use permits be shifted entirely to the Board of Adjustment. Special use permits are kind of a unique type of development approval. They are what's called a quasi judicial approval, which means that they come with really, really stringent procedural rules, really stringent rules around who can provide evidence how decisions have to be made and it's it's difficult right or it can be difficult for a legislative body like town council to switch between making quasi-judicial decisions in the form of a special use permit and legislative decisions which is kind of their bread and butter so the idea of moving special use permits to the board of adjustment which The Board of Adjustments' only business is in making quasi-judicial decisions. It really makes sure that bodies that are well-versed in a certain type of procedure are the ones most heavily responsible for those. So happy to pause here. I know I kind of injected a lot of potential opportunity for conversation, so I'm happy to take a quick pause here to see if there's any feedback or concerns about these proposals?

Yeah, so I'll let you call on people instead of me. I can stay out of this.

John, did you say you wanted me to do that?

Yeah, sure. I mean, if you can't see whose hand went up first, you can send it over to me, but I think it's probably more efficient for you to just see people pop up and you can call on them without me intervening. Sure.

Thanks, Liz.

What can I do for you? So the three points you make here, I see how they definitely address the first part, the streamline. And I'm just curious, the second part of this, ensure administrative pathways support complete community outcomes. Have you all thought about what is there? Have you put thought into that as well?

Yeah, absolutely. And that's what I was kind of getting at. earlier that the one of the best ways for town council to really safeguard and implement complete community is to make sure that that complete community principles are kind of imbued throughout Lumo, right? That Lumo becomes the major implementing tool for complete community. So that's one part. There's also just this element that Procedural efficiency in and of itself is a complete community goal. So making sure that we're making decisions in the most efficient and transparent way possible in and of itself is a complete community goal. So with any of these, right, there's that efficiency and procedural benefit. And then there's also the opportunity to just let Lumo, right, do its work more directly with some of these projects. And in some cases that means kind of doing less work, right? If it's a small scale project, not putting a commercial business owner or commercial property owner through unnecessary procedural requirements that meets a complete community interest of supporting our business communities, making sure that special use permits are heard and adjudicated by a body that is really well-versed in quasi-judicial decision-making that meets a complete community interest in and of itself. And then on the back end, Council's decision on what types of projects go through a special use permit is an act of kind of implementing complete community.

Okay. Thanks.

Yeah, Mike. Oh, Mike, you're muted.

Thank you. On the 2nd bullet, is there a way to quantify what small scale commercial project means?

Yeah, so it's all it is all quantified in the ordinance. I am admittedly not remembering the numbers off the top of my head, but I think it's 500 square feet.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's. I think it's like, 500 square feet of. floor area at 1,500 square feet of land disturbance, or somewhere around those numbers.

Yeah, the alignment memo says no more than 500 square feet of impervious surface.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. And so it's those metrics, but then also things like outside the floodplain, it's not particularly close to property lines, no RCD impacts, things of that sort. Thank you.

Yeah, John. I just had a very brief comment about the special use permit procedural change. I don't have any issue with it, you know, shifting some of that to the body that normally operates in a quasi-judicial manner. I just had a small question. You don't have to answer it comprehensively. Maybe it's a question comment. So my understanding is that Conditional rezoning in large part replaced SUPs in the state of North Carolina over the last whatever decade, two decades, I don't know how long. And there's still some legacy things and a lot of codes, towns, ordinances that still involve SUPs and some of those are legacy projects. And this gets way beyond my knowledge. There could be... you know, uses where planners prefer to use SUPs, you know, going forward, even if the predominant mechanism is conditional rezoning. I think there's a lot of legacy stuff in our current LUMO, like SUPs are mentioned way more than they should be. And I assume that like some of those things are being phased out. And I just wanted to make a request that if, if, the planning department and the consultants feel that like SUPs aren't as good as, or aren't preferred in relation to conditional rezoning for some of this stuff, just get rid of the mechanism, except in so far as it's really needed and useful. It's just confusing to have all these different things.

Yeah, definitely. one one effect of these legacy um special use permits is that it'll be quite some time if at all before council is fully out of the sup business because modifications to special use permits have to be heard by the body that originally approved them so um there will be some special use permits that that are still kind of making their way up to council unless the property owner decides that they actually want to go the conditional zoning route and just kind of start fresh. Special use permits tend to be really helpful when the underlying zoning conditions support a particular use, but there's something, again, It sounds like lawyers that try to explain what does beyond a reasonable doubt means. It means beyond a reasonable doubt. So with special use permits, there's something special about their use. There's something unique about the impacts that it has. And so it warrants heightened scrutiny. And so that's where we want to kind of allow special use permits to evolve in how we use them, that they... We've established that the zoning is appropriate through council's legislative decision-making, but specific uses might need some additional scrutiny.

Yeah, I follow you.

Thanks. All right, so moving on, I'll jump over to item five. And this is this notion of balancing efficiency with community benefits that can't be achieved solely through administrative processes. And so where this really comes into play is updating THE THRESHOLDS AT WHICH A PROJECT KIND OF SHIFTS FROM BY RIGHT, SO AN ADMINISTRATIVE APPROVAL TO A LEGISLATIVE APPROVAL OR CONDITIONAL ZONING. AS MANY OF YOU MAY KNOW, CHAPEL HILL HAS VERY LOW THRESHOLDS UNDER THE CURRENT ORDINANCE FOR WHAT CAN BE APPROVED BY RIGHT. And so one of the kind of hallmark changes in the new LUMO is going to be an increase of a lot of these buy right thresholds. And so what you'll see kind of based on on which particular zoning district or districts you're talking about, these thresholds are going to increase pretty significantly. And before I kind of talk through these specific numbers, I'll mention the baseline that we're starting with is that in our primary multifamily zoning district, R6, you need a conditional zoning if you're doing 10 or more. units of multi-family and then more generally if you're doing more than 20 000 square feet of floor area or 40 000 square feet of land disturbance you're kicked into technically a special use permit but most property owners see that as as kind of a an invitation to a conditional zoning and so we're proposing to really significantly ramp up those numbers, but not so high, right? We don't want to ramp up those numbers so high that we lose that ability to secure certain types of community benefits from projects where it would be really meaningful for them to go through a conditional zoning. So what you'll see here for residential development, start at kind of a new baseline of 30 units and work our way up from there, really just allowing a little bit more baked in by right development in our town center zoning district, knowing that it's more expensive to build downtown. We want to kind of make that an easier process to a certain extent. We're also increasing the non-residential floor area limits pretty significantly, at least doubling them in kind of our lower intensity districts, and then going further from that in, for example, the town center districts. That middle column of, well, what if we express residential limits in terms of floor area instead of units, that actually comes from an idea from Planning Commission of how can we incentivize or create more opportunities for developments that want to promote smaller units. So that's where A project could do more than 30 units by right as long as their total residential floor area doesn't exceed 30,000 square feet or sub 1,000 square foot units. So these are all, again, significant increases from our current baselines, but they're not so large that we would lose the ability to negotiate for meaningful community benefits from larger, more impactful development. Any questions on this before I move on to the next point? Yeah, John.

Yeah, I have one question slash comment on this. First of all, thank you for incorporating that change to make sure there aren't perverse disincentives for smaller units. That's a great change you made. I have a somewhat different incentives puzzle that I'm working on, which is wherever you set the line, There is, I don't know how strong it is, but there is an incentive for developers to stay below the line so they don't have to go through conditional rezoning and all the expense and time involved. And in a way, that's unfortunate. You'd have to draw the line somewhere, but it's unfortunate because I don't know how much merit this has, but there's a school of thought and planning that says it's the bigger projects the more massive projects that tend to bring more community benefits. And if anything, it's best for municipalities to go out of their way to incentivize land combinations, agglomerations of land, so you can have bigger, more coherent projects that are just better in those respects, more coherent. And I have a slight concern. I don't think it's enough that I would feel um that we need to stay with the current limits i think it's okay and appropriate to take them up but i'm just in the back of my mind i have a concern about at what point are we kind of doing something self-defeating here like we're trying to uh streamline a process but at the same time we're making it we're discouraging like big projects that break big benefits and i would i would cite aura as an example i would say south creek as an example they have extraordinary public spaces compared to any project that's half the size that we're ever going to see. And I want that to be something that is encouraged by the LIMO and not discourage what people are saying below the limit. That's the concern. And I'm just putting that out there to see what your reaction is.

Yeah. And I think that's where, I don't want to say the beauty of these numbers comes into play, but I think it The numbers you'll see here, right, 30 units of residential, 45 units of residential, those are still a long ways away from the 200, 300 unit projects, 800 units in case of like South Creek. that we know are still going to be coming through the pipe. There's essentially just too much institutional investment, too much big money in real estate development for those big projects to not continue to come through the pipeline. And we've made, you know, with improvements that you all deliberated and council passed earlier in the year, we've made improvements to what that process looks like. So it's not so tedious for a larger project that is going to provide a lot of meaningful benefit to move through the review process. I think what this does is it these higher numbers, we see them as rather than kind of stealing from the high end of, or the upper end of projects, they're kind of, they're fertilizing some ground for the opportunity for smaller, more like retail investors to break into the market. So it's kind of widening the pool of folks that might be willing to do business in town.

Yeah, that all makes sense to me. Thank you. Yep.

Liz.

I think Jeff had his hand up. Jeff, did you change your mind? So this is just a point going back to my last question about the balance, or this had the term balance. It feels like by giving up some of the buy right, that the town had, they were clearly using the buy right not to try to make people's lives different, but to achieve public goods that are not going to happen in a vacuum because private interests aren't going to go invest in public goods. And you have said multiple times there are other ways to get these, which I agree. Totally understand. And I'm not saying that this is a bad idea, but it would be great to see because in these two topic sentence, you both you talk about the balance and still achieving these. What other things the staff or the town will be doing at the same time as you give up? you know, as you make it by right and the council and the town gives up some of this leverage that they did have, which made it cumbersome. What are the other things that happen at the same time? Where are you focusing to make sure you still are going for these goals that the town is? So it's just a comment of it it can't be just the streamlining. It still has to be the other things and what are they and how are we going to make sure those happen if we do go for streamlining and more buy rate, et cetera.

Yeah, 100%. And a couple of important points to mention there. One is... at the last time we checked, other than a couple of purpose-built affordable projects, the smallest kind of mixed income development that went through the conditional zoning process, basically since conditional zoning became a thing, was a 48-unit townhome project. And so that 48 units, that was one of the instructive numbers that helped us kind of identify the numbers that you see here, right? That we just weren't seeing smaller scale projects coming through. We also looked really heavily at One of the biggest community benefits that we know we seek out of residential development, which is affordable housing. We did a lot of economic analysis and found that there's a lower bound, right? That beyond a certain size limit, it's not economically feasible for a project to provide affordable housing. which gives us some comfort that we're not giving up something by kind of turning over some of these smaller scale projects to a buy right process. But just in case, we've also put in place a set of really robust incentives to try to get some affordable housing out of projects that go through the buy right process. and that's something that i definitely should have touched on more that there are built into the buy right process there's a lot of mechanisms that still attempt to get some version of the public benefits that we would typically see through a conditional zoning greenways for example are something where We can have rules that require people to build connectivity through their site. There's no rule that we could impose that allows us to force somebody to make a greenway publicly accessible, right? That's the sort of thing that we would have to negotiate for through a conditional zoning. But one of the things we're looking to do or we will be doing in the draft, is heavily incentivizing Greenway dedication on a by-right project. So using our recreation space requirements, for example, as a hook to say that regardless of what your recreation space or your amenity space requirements might be, if your project sits along a a route that's been identified in one of the town's adopted plans for greenways and you build that greenway and you make it publicly accessible your amenity space your recreation space requirements are fully satisfied by that dedication And so there are these other mechanisms that we're kind of peppering in throughout that aim to replicate some of those broader interests through the buy-write process. And then there's just kind of more generally this notion that And this is really both a mindset shift, but I think also just like an economic reality for the town. We are recognizing more and more that new development in and of itself is a community benefit, right? Our tax base needs to grow, it needs to diversify. And so we're looking to address that in part through this. So thank you for the reminder, Liz, that it is about talking about the... the other elements of the balance too and i am really confident that we are we're building that in throughout the buy right process thank you thank you Okay, so I think that covers the kind of user-friendliness items. Next, I want to touch on a topic that, again, you'll see some overlap in what we've discussed already, but the second major interest identified by Council was this notion of housing diversity, attainability, and supply. And within that, five kind of more specific interests. I'm actually gonna propose that we kind of walk through each of these. I think they're all kind of ripe for discussion. But generally speaking, we're looking at this notion of increasing density interspersed with different amenities, expanding permissions for missing middle and middle income households, maintaining or increasing affordable housing around town, encouraging smaller units and ensuring kind of context sensitive infill. So moving into that first item of increasing density, I'll just briefly touch on both of these here, but I'll talk about both of them in more detail in the next item. The new LUMO, as we've kind of touched on already, is going to increase by right residential density in most zoning districts. Really the only zoning districts where you're not going to see some change in density are the very low density districts that are really reserved for the extraterritorial jurisdiction so basically outside of town limits there's really no element of our comp plan that supports significant additional density in the etj and when you look at where complete community directs the town to grow you know complete community identifies four kind of priorities for growth, large infill sites, smaller infill sites, areas along transit routes and areas with greenway access. And the ETJ just doesn't really fit any of those metrics. And so we're looking to increase density primarily for the districts that are used in town. And then the other element is that we really want to be very mindful about in some of our lower intensity zoning districts, not just increasing density across the board, but thinking about that land use and transportation kind of nexus and being mindful about incremental increases in density near greenways and near higher capacity roads. And so I'll just kind of roll into the next topic because again, there's some really significant overlap here. And so the next topic is this notion of expanding permissions for middle income and missing middle housing. I mentioned that what we would be proposing is that basically increased density near greenways and along higher density roads. We're also going to propose, what you'll see in the new LUMO, is at least one new zoning district that's really intended to be kind of tailor-made for new missing middle housing, as opposed to kind of infill missing middle housing. And so Here's what that kind of looks like to increase density in kind of some strategic ways. So you've got your R1 and R2 districts where under the current rules, Two units per lot is kind of the maximum density that you're allowed. What we would propose is keeping that the same at baseline, but for properties that are within a quarter mile of a greenway entrance or along a higher capacity road, so an arterial or collector road, you get that next increment up of density. So instead of two units per lot, you get four units per lot. i'll mention there i think one point that we would would really be eager to get some feedback on is um a whether you you want to stick to this notion of kind of density bonuses based on proximity to different types of transportation infrastructure and if if so um is that quarter mile from a greenway entrance is that something you would actually like to see grow that radius to a Greenway entrance reflects kind of a more conservative approach, because I think that's what we were kind of picking up was the interest that if we were going to expand some of these missing middle housing opportunities that we took somewhat more measured approach, but quarter mile radius can very easily become a half mile radius or some other measure if there's an interest in doing that. So again, you'll see that kind of pattern repeating throughout. So in a lot of districts where the current baseline might only be two or four, you see that baseline continue forward, but then the next increment becomes available based on proximity to transportation infrastructure. The really kind of exciting new zoning district that we're proposing, still in the bucket of kind of smaller scale residential, is this new RD district. It would allow 8 to 12 units, no minimum lot size, pretty small setbacks. It's really kind of like a townhome cottage court district. And that's kind of the prototypical development that we would hope to see in a district like that. And it could be used, I think, to really great effect around the perimeter of existing large multifamily developments to kind of create transitions into lower density districts. It can be used in a lot of really interesting ways. Yeah, Jeff.

Yeah, I see it's mentioned as units per lot from a density perspective, but if there's no lot size standards in the new RD district, what's controlling the density?

Ultimately, the density would be controlled by impervious surface, so there would still be like a 70% impervious surface maximum. And you would have setbacks and some other dimensional standards. So really as long as you can fit those eight to 12 units on a lot, still meet your impervious surface, still meet your setbacks. I think that's where we would kind of ultimately control density that way.

Okay, I just, because density is usually thought of as dwelling units per area of land. And since the lot is not a defined, I mean, you could have a 8,000 square foot lot with 12 pretty small units that would fit. So I just, that's what I'm not quite understanding. We don't need to dig into it now. When I see the draft, I'm sure it'll be a lot more clear.

Yeah, it is definitely different. I'll just note quickly, that was a shift that we made a couple of years ago with the housing choices text amendments. We shifted from the typical units per acre to a new kind of units per lot measure. So again, across the... Oh, yeah, go ahead, John.

So while we're on this, I wanted to raise... Incentives concern. I'm the incentives guy. I'm worried that, so let me provide just some quick context. I think a lot about greenways and bike pad infrastructure. And one of the things that happens oftentimes when the town proposes even the idea of a greenway that isn't imminently going to be built, neighbors who have land adjacent to the greenways oppose it on safety and privacy grounds and that sort of thing. Um, that's a challenge that we're going to have to, um, face going forward. If we link zoning to greenways, then the future, it's not just that people are going to be upset that there's a greenway coming to their backyard and they don't like that. They're also, and their neighbors are going to say, Hey, you know, we're within a quarter mile radius of this greenway, this greenway entrance. Now, if this actually goes in, all of us are gonna have to deal with quad plexes or eight plexes in our neighborhood. We need to oppose this. And I don't think that we need to bring on ourselves that level of opposition to greenways. They're hard enough to build with opposition by local landowners without adding, without supercharging that opposition. So I would prefer that if we're gonna make, zoning linked to location of greenways we do it only for legacy or existing greenways and for new ones we don't do that we say if we put a new greenway there's no automatic up zoning of everything around it we'll deal with that um on a one-off basis through the land use map or otherwise

Got it. Yeah, no, that's a really helpful perspective. I think we know the risk is lurking out there. And I think, like you said, there's not a clear answer, but I think that perspective is really helpful and definitely something that we should continue to explore. So moving on to the next item, there's this question of affordable housing, right? How do we maintain or increase the amount of affordable housing that's produced around town, including within market rate projects? And so there's a couple of things we plan to, uh you include in the the new ordinance um the first and i alluded to this earlier in response to liz's question about community benefits um are incentives for affordable housing for kind of smaller scale projects We plan on a really robust set of incentives for projects that aren't going through a conditional zoning. And those are kind of your typical bread and butter density bonuses, things like additional height, additional floor area ratio, reduced setbacks, or reduced landscape buffers. But what we've added to the mix that I think you don't see in a lot of other communities or other communities I'm familiar with at all is this notion that we're not just increasing those dimensional standards or we're not just providing relief on the dimensional standards, we're also providing relief on those thresholds of when a project would get kicked into a conditional zoning. um so you could for example in a district that otherwise might top you out at 30 units of residential development if you're providing the the target level of affordable units you could do 48 units without going through a conditional zoning. If you're hitting an even higher target, your numbers more than double, right? You could do more than 75 units without a conditional zoning. That second target level, that higher target, that's really aimed at helping LIHTC projects move through the pipeline much quicker. What we are typically hearing is that that 75 to 85 unit range is kind of the sweet spot for LIHTC projects right now. And so we're trying to create a pathway that a LIHTC project could actually move forward with a purely administrative review. The other thing that we're looking to do is build on or kind of continue the momentum that you all in council started a couple of years ago when you adopted the we've typically referred to as kind of the expedited review for affordable housing projects. It's all tied up in a special conditional zoning district, the residential community priority conditional zoning district. And so we're basically continuing to make sure that that district stays ahead of the rest that when a project goes through seeks a rezoning to this rcp conditional zoning district it has an even more streamlined process than other projects that are going through the conditional zoning process a major element there would be even less detail in their site plans really kind of stripping down the the site plan requirements to um really the bare minimum right that they identify the general area on which they're going to build identify any environmental constraints and identify where there's going to be major connections to public streets but they're not locked into kind of a site-specific plan in the same way some other conditional zonings are So again, the goal here is to make sure that as we've made improvements across the board with the omnibus earlier this year to conditional zoning, we want to make sure that this special affordable housing focused district continues to stay kind of out ahead of the pack. Any questions on either of those topics before I move on?

Yeah, John. Just a quick question on the smaller scale incentives. You'd mentioned to us a year or so ago in a presentation on the LUMO when the planning department is working through with the consultants, like how to calibrate incentives for affordable housing, the difficulty of calibrating it correctly. And that you said to us at the time, like the incentives have to be really, really big to move the dial economically. And then as I recall, when he came back to us or to the council with a proposal, like the one you're describing here, you couch it in terms of like, you know, it might not work, but the least we can do is, you know, put it out there in case somebody wants to take advantage of it. So my question is, are we as a town, as a planning department aware of peers, peer municipalities that have, recently used incentives like this for smaller development with success and got a bunch of units out of it. Because I would say it's not zero cost to put in an incentive framework in the LUMO that isn't used or we expect to very rarely be used. It's not zero cost because it affects goal number one. It makes the thing longer and more complex. And I think that's only worth it if we're actually expecting to get mileage out of it.

Yeah, absolutely. We do not know of communities that have had really robust success with incentives. I also haven't seen communities that have incentives as kind of generous as the ones that we're proposing. So for example, At baseline, we're proposing kind of 60% increase in floor area ratio, 60% increase in height, 50% reduction in landscape buffers and setbacks, some pretty generous stuff. And then you layer on top of that, this opportunity to build without having to go through a conditional zoning, even if you're kind of a slightly larger project. So what we really took from the advice of the consultants and the analysis was that if we want any shot at this, we've got to really kind of go big. I see.

So for the smaller stuff, you're pushing the envelope on purpose and it's a bit experimental. We'll see if it works. Exactly.

Yeah. And I'll also note that I've talked about this a lot in the context of multifamily. We're also going to have incentives for subdivisions. And the incentive there is a 50% reduction in the minimum lot size. So basically doubling the potential density of a subdivision. So again, like really trying to shake some stuff loose at that smaller end of the scale. Thanks.

Yeah. The subdivision, if it has 25% affordable housing, or what are you, you're saying this, I missed the context of the subdivision.

Yeah, so I was just mentioning that reduction in minimum lot size would be the incentive tied to meeting the affordable housing goal. So it would be 20% of lots affordable um or a um uh a commensurate like payment in lieu to the town got it yeah um okay so moving on to the next item um one of the kind of key interests in in the housing bucket the idea of encouraging smaller and more attainable units um this first I also already mentioned when we're talking about the buy right thresholds, we're going to express them independently, right? Both as number of units, but then if you surpass that number of units, there's then a floor area limit that kicks in. So somebody could do a lot of small units and move through in a buy right approval. Another area where we're looking to kind of encourage or outright require smaller units is in how we're kind of ramping up or not the maximum floor area for certain types of missing middle housing. So you'll see in the little table here, we have, or the new LUMO will include The existing maximum floor size for maximum floor area for duplexes, which was just recently increased to 5000 square feet. But then when we get to triplexes and fourplexes, that maximum floor area only increases by 1000 square feet total. So as you'll see on the far right, as you get into these duplexes, kind of more dense housing types, the average unit size would decrease because we're not ramping up the total floor area at kind of the same rate. So that's, again, an opportunity to to both encourage and outright require smaller units. The other thing, just in terms of more attainable units, is manufactured homes. We have traditionally kind of segregated manufactured homes from other types of home construction, right? Site-built, stick-built homes or modular homes. And what we've seen over the years is that the regulations that govern manufactured homes continue to improve. The quality of manufactured homes continues to improve, and they are just more and more being seen as a as a viable pathway to providing attainable units. There's obviously some some risk or not risk, but we have seen manufactured homes be used in a kind of exploitative way. but that's because of a particular business model of a manufactured home park that's not inherent in how manufactured homes are used or occupied. And so what we're proposing is to basically take kind of like a homes or homes approach, right? It doesn't matter whether it's a manufactured home, a modular home, or a stick-built home, Lumo's gonna treat them all the same. Um, any questions on any of these points before or feedback on any of these before I move on? Yeah, Jeff.

Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, just a couple of things. Um, uh. Not to belabor the point I've made before, but I assume there's still no limit on the size of a single family house. So we're continuing to. where we may be requiring and encouraging smaller units, but we're also disincentivizing the construction of them because Chapel Hill has plenty of 6,000 square foot single family homes. Um, I'm a couple of other things, big supporter of loosening restrictions on manufactured housing or treating them as site-built homes. Um, Virginia just a couple months ago passed a law, uh, making that mandatory statewide. So I, I don't know how much of an impact it'll have, but again, um, pulling out, you know, any unnecessary limitations is important for housing development. Um, um, And this is actually going back to the last one. Sorry for not bringing this up earlier, but I looked at a map of arterial and collector streets, and a lot of them are, think of Estes. And I know Estes has that nice new bike facility. Other parts of Estes don't have a bike facility. And I just don't think that between Library Drive and Caswell would be a great place to put a fourplex. it is not, you know, a safe or pleasant environment. Many of the local streets that connect off of Estes and that go behind Estes, on the other hand, I think would be much better for higher intensity development. So I have a, I mean, I think John's point is well taken about greenways. I have a concern about, you know, limiting tri and fourplexes to these streets, which are generally speaking, less pleasant to live on.

Kaz, had you gotten to that point yet about the linkage to street designations? I was holding my comment on that.

Wasn't that a slide before?

Yeah, I had mentioned it. I think I focused more heavily on the greenway element of it. Okay, sorry.

I'm glad that Jeff is doing me a favor. Jeff, why don't you finish what you're doing and then I'll come after you.

Oh, that was mostly it. And that was, yeah, I was, but I'm done with this slide.

Okay, so I'm going to go back because... Jeff caught something that I didn't.

John, I did want to just check. I think Mike had his hand up.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I totally forgot about Mike. Mike, sorry. Go ahead. That's OK. Taz, did we do a research that was the average unit size on duplexes across the U.S. This seems to be high. I was just looking at 2,500. It seems to be big for what we call average unit size that we are now requiring, calling it small units. I was just wondering where we got these numbers that we think these are the right numbers.

Yeah, so the 5,000 square foot max for duplexes was just approved by council earlier this year. It had been 3,000 square feet, increased it to 5,000. Where we base that proposal on was actually looking at just median unit size in Chapel Hill. So looking at single family home, median size hovers around 2500 square feet. And so we wanted to kind of replicate that opportunity because one of the things that we were hearing from the development community was that outside of kind of particularly lucrative parts of town, building 3,000 square foot duplex just wasn't worth their while. That in order to attract families or just kind of a wider range of households, that significantly larger footprint is actually much more conducive to floor plans that support families. I think as so many of us have dealt with working from home as a result of the pandemic, just kind of understanding that folks nowadays, I think kind of modern families need more space at home than they typically have. And so we wanted to at least give that option for folks to build to meet the market. But knowing that if you add more units on a lot, all else being equal, you are driving the price down or at least creating an opportunity to drive the price down.

So let me see if I can kind of read, and thank you for the answer. If I read this correctly or interpreting this correctly, this is effective average unit size, not effective maximum unit size. In another word, if I have 5,000 total floor space for a duplex, I can put into 1500 square foot. I don't have to go to 2500 square foot unit.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. So you don't have to hit that maximum or that average unit size at all. That's just there to illustrate the idea that with these more dense options, you're going to be kind of putting pressure on the units to be smaller. And it also means that, you know, within, let's say a duplex, right? You've got that 5,000 square feet to work with. Just like you said, Mike, you could do two 1,500 square foot units. You could do one 3,000 square foot unit and one 2,000 square foot unit. So you could, you've got flexibility within that maximum to kind of play around with.

I think Mike's point is that's a little misleading, but I think it's effective average. Well, that's still the maximum, the average maximum.

Yeah.

Not the average size of the units.

Yeah, I definitely see that, and we can work on making sure that that's a little bit more accurate.

Yeah, I mean, I was thinking the same thing. I'm sorry, Taz, but Taz, you just pointed out that that's not even max because you could put a 4,000 and 1,000. You could put 3,000 and 2,000, okay? But it is misleading, okay? You could basically put in two units of whatever size you want up to 5,000.

jeff you can go ahead again if you want and i'll come in with mine oh sorry my hand shouldn't have been up okay um so taz i want to go back uh to the point jeff was making about the street designation so we have arterial i guess we have a three tier system of streets in the in the town we have arterials collectors and uh what do you call local local neighborhood streets and as i understand it um The proposal here is to link higher levels of missing middle housing permissibility to, partially, to street designations. So if a street is designated as an arterial or a circulator, that would mean you're permitted to have higher level of density like quadplexes or what have you. I think that makes a lot of sense at an abstract level. But to Jeff's point, the more I have looked at the map of what are the collector streets and think about it at the ground level, the less it makes sense. And so Jeff gave an example of Estes between Caswell and the library, or let's say Franklin. The example that comes to mind for me is Dixie Drive between Piney Mountain and MLK. Um, now here's a road that's designated as a collector road. It has no sidewalks. It has no prospect for sidewalks. The, the traffic on that road currently is so light that I run it every week and I run it in the middle of the street. I don't even look for cars. There's very light traffic less than in my row, which is a cul-de-sac and the housing on that street. Currently it's all single family and it's, um, indistinguishable in character type. from all the streets that intersect it besides the major ones like MLK. And so I'm just envisioning, you know, automatically in a stroke of a pen, this street, which is basically for all intents and purposes, a local neighborhood street is just not a cul-de-sac, gets up zoned while the streets that intersect it houses properties just around the corner are treated differently. And that just seems... very strange to me. And I would say, as you know, I have no issue with quadplexes. I voted to do it townwide in 2022 on the Planning Commission. Where I have an issue is drawing the lines arbitrarily based on distinctions like street designations that were never designed for that purpose and that haven't been updated in contemplation of that purpose. If we want to just apply quadplexes across the board without commenting at all on the political wisdom of that, which I'm staying out of, from a planning perspective, I don't see a problem with it. If we want to use the land use map revision process to look at the town and say, where do we think it makes sense for this to exist and not do it based on this legacy street designation thing? I think that would be perfectly fine. You mentioned that we're contemplating a new zone for missing middle housing. If we wanted to create a new zone to sort of apply it where we want, that makes sense. But I'm really not on board with using the Collector Street designation as a proxy for zoning.

Yeah, thank you for that perspective, John. That's really valuable to hear. I think that will be one of the topics in which we're probably gonna need the most robust discussion and guidance from you all and council, because I think we've teed it up as a question in the alignment memo, right? Like, is that treatment the right one or do we wanna go broader? There's also the option of just doing less and waiting for zoning map change. Yeah, Liz.

I just want to second Jen's point. I think it would be a mistake to use that. Gotcha.

Well, thank you guys for the input. I think we've got a couple of representatives from council, and we can make sure to highlight that point as we continue the discussion on this item. Let me get back to where we were. So, okay, so the next bit, or actually before I jump into the next bit, were there any other kind of questions or comments around this item? Okay. So the next item under housing was this notion of context sensitive infill. And context sensitive infill is, you see standards like that kind of take a lot of different forms. One of the things that we're not proposing to include in the draft is anything that kind of bases building form or building size on the size of adjacent existing buildings. You'll see some infill standards that'll say your building can be no more than 12 feet taller than the shortest building on the adjacent lot. I think that's how Durham's infill sensitivity standards are drafted. We're not suggesting taking that route because it really kind of locks in private decisions that were made potentially decades ago and kind of locks in that pattern. I think what we're proposing is more generally applicable standards that are still going to help ensure that new development is consistent with older development, but still able to kind of push the ball forward in terms of what infill can look like. And so a couple of things that you'll see in the draft, We want to be very sensitive to boundaries between higher intensity development and lower intensity development. So that is one area in which, based on the zoning district designation, you might see a multifamily project or a commercial project that's near a lower intensity residential district, you might see that larger, more intense use have some additional standards, some setbacks, some height controls that allow it to more easily kind of transition into adjacent lower density development.

I'm sorry?

The other thing that we're going to be looking at is actually allowing more infill, right? So we are proposing New LUMO will have standards for a smaller scale commercial development as infill in residential zoning districts. So the New LUMO establishes kind of micro retail and micro restaurants, basically something under 3,000 square feet. And those would be allowed in, and R1 and R2 zoning districts. That's also premised on street type, but that standard of certain businesses being allowed on certain street types is something we have seen. It already exists in LUMO and it speaks more to you know, are services more available? Would there be an expectation of higher traffic volume on those streets already? Knowing that there are obviously going to be exceptions to the norm, but we're looking at kind of generally applicable standards. The other idea that we're looking at, again, this is thinking about how can we leverage generally applicable standards to make sure that new development is kind of sensitive to its context? I think one thing that we hear and see all the time is that parking is one of the most kind of readily visible and most impactful It's one of the most significant impacts that new development can have. And so we currently have a tool to help mitigate that impact, which is restrictions on front yard parking. but that restriction currently only applies to single family and duplexes. And so the new LUMO would propose to expand that restriction to triplexes and fourplexes, again, to try to make sure that we're using those generally applicable standards to maximum benefit. We've also got, and I think this is, probably one of the biggest impacts that we could see for infill development is street tree requirements. Now these would kick in for any residential development with five or more units, and then basically any commercial development. And I think, again, one of the things that we'll see anywhere in town is that mature trees can hide a lot of stuff, right? And so we're trying to kind of create an environment in which if we're going to see new infill development, especially kind of the higher end of what we might consider infill development, we're trying to mitigate what that would appear to look like from the street.

moving towards kind of that longer longer term vision for the town um any questions on any of these infill related standards yeah liz uh on the last one with the trees um is there gonna be a size minimum so they don't just put in a tiny sapling and will they be required to make sure that it They're responsible that it reaches maturity. And how are you gonna deal with the fire issue that's constantly and Duke Power constantly minimizing the trees that we can put on the streets with these new developments?

Yeah, so I'll take those in turn. One is like, what can people plant to meet the requirement? And we do have standards for kind of the minimum size that's allowed for a new tree. A little counterintuitively, it's not actually particularly beneficial to ramp up that minimum size requirement too high. There's kind of a sweet spot of kind of three to four inches in the diameter of the tree trunk. If you get much bigger than that, The tree is already kind of more established and has a harder time adapting to a new environment. We're also going to be looking at not just how you plant or not just what you plant, but how you plant it. So the updated tree protection ordinance. basically incorporates all of the planting standards in the design manual that has essentially best practices for how you plant new trees. They've for a long time just been suggestions, but what we're doing is saying if by function of some rule in the ordinance, you have to plant a new tree, you're going to do it right. that's that's a key element there um the other thing and you mentioned two of the the biggest concerns when it comes to to street trees is fire access and uh duke utility easements um as far as fire access goes um we are We're going to be looking at allowing kind of modifications of the spacing of trees so that if there is a concern with fire access, the spacing of trees can can change to still allow for the fire access requirements. So we don't wanna put people in a position where they are given two sets of competing mandates. And then similarly with utility easements, it's about giving adequate kind of flexibility. So we're not tightly prescribing how close to the street the trees need to be. We're basically saying that they can be within the public right of way, or as far as 10 feet into the property line. And so that creates, I think, kind of a pretty sizable bit of wiggle room for folks to kind of adjust and get around easements if needed. But ultimately, both fire access and utility easements are going to have to win if it comes to kind of a contest between those standards and the street tree standards. So what we're trying to do is create enough flexibility that it's not kind of a zero sum game there.

And if the tree dies within the first seven or eight years, which is the time period that they're most vulnerable, is the owner, the builder responsible for maintaining the tree and replacing it? Or is that just sort of once they've planted it, they're done?

yeah so for for street trees for buffers um it's an ongoing responsibility okay um mike yes um just uh maybe um a point on limits on front yard parking would that be a little bit more stronger to say restrictions on front yard parking

So the current rules don't prohibit front yard parking altogether, but they limit how much of the front yard can be used for parking. So the current rules say that no more than 40 percent of the front yard can be used for parking and driveways. And the the only recent change that we've made to that is as part of the omnibus text amendments earlier this year, we created a kind of a de minimis exemption. So if your front yard is so small that If you had two cars out front, that would exceed 40%. We've said that you can at least have two cars, even if you have a very tight front yard. But other than that, we haven't changed the front yard parking rule. This would just apply it to more types of housing.

Okay. Thank you.

Yep. Thanks, Mike. John.

Just two quick comments of agreement on this. In terms of street trees, Taz, you mentioned that they can hide a lot. One of the things they hide is the sun when you don't want it beating down on you. And I think as the town tries to encourage and moves toward more multimodal transportation, it's really important to have those street trees to induce people to not go straight from their living room to their garage. to their car to work, to actually go outside. It's just really hard when there's no street trees. You're just kind of exposed and hot and the heat is radiating off the pavement. So I'm pleased to see, and I think it's consistent with the direction the town is going with transportation to have a street tree requirement, number one. Number two, on transition zones. So thinking about the What is that map called? It has an acronym. It has heights of buildings across town with cross hatches where there's a transition zone. What's the name of that document?

That's the flume.

Thank you. The flume. So the flume has these transition zones. And I feel like what we need and it sounds like what we're getting is like V 2.0 of whatever the flume was very unsuccessfully trying to do with those cross hatches. whenever we have a conditional rezoning that abuts a residential neighborhood, we have an inordinate amount of discussion from neighbors and among ourselves about what that actually means, the transition zone, like how high can you go in relation to the buildings next door and what distance and what kind of buffer. And we've talked about it in the planning commission with you in the past, Taz, and with your colleagues in the planning department, how great it would be to standardize this Uh, so that these discussions can be sort of had at a global level level once and come up with a good, thoughtful set of standards. And then after that, the, the answer is we have standards for this. We're not gonna, we're not gonna amend them for each and every one. Um, so I applaud the effort. Um, it sounds like the effort to, uh, to standardize transition zones.

Thank you, John. And your comment on street trees actually remind me of something that I think is helpful to mention here. One of the things that we're going to try with street trees is a provision that And it's couched in, you know, to the maximum extent practical, but so it becomes kind of a really strong suggestion. But the provision that says that to the maximum extent practical, when street trees are adjacent to some sort of pedestrian infrastructure, so sidewalks, multi-use paths, what have you, that the location of the street trees relative to that pedestrian infrastructure is going to maximize shade for the pedestrian infrastructure. It feels like such a shame to have a road that's perfectly oriented in the way that if you put the street trees in one location, you're creating an amazing experience for folks using the sidewalk. But if you put it on the other side of the sidewalk, then the benefit all disappears. So we're going to try that. Like I said, it's couched in this to the maximum extent practical, but it's a really good, I think, push in the right direction.

Sounds great. Thanks.

All right. Any other questions on this topic before we move on? All right, so that brings us to, I've kind of lost count, but I think we're in the third of the major kind of topic areas, economic development and land use. And this one really, There's two kind of specific interests housed under this one. I'll speak to the first interest. The second interest is this idea of aligning overall land use patterns. I think we found that it's actually really heavily tied to some of the other things that we've talked about. There isn't anything specific to highlight for point two here other than that there's kind of linkages to other goals. So I'll focus on this kind of question of neighborhood scale commercial uses and how we can really support those. And I think there's... A couple of things to think about with neighborhood scale commercial and what it actually means to support neighborhood scale commercial. On the one hand, you can support neighborhood scale commercial by making sure that existing commercial development has a meaningful amount of residential density nearby, right? That there are a meaningful amount of people that are able to walk or bike to existing commercial nodes. That's one side of the coin. And the other side of the coin is creating more opportunities to build more neighborhood commercial nodes. And so we're trying to address both of those, right? So we've already talked about increasing residential density in a lot of zoning districts. So that's intended to hit one side of the coin. And then the other side of the coin is this notion of just allowing more small scale commercial development around town. And that really runs the gamut from, like I mentioned, kind of these micro retail, micro restaurant opportunities. then also tying that to the discussion about um kind of more lenient standards or not more lenient standards but just higher thresholds for buy right development that actually come with more stringent development standards but more that you can do by right allowing those to kind of be built around town right um i think a lot of what we maybe don't intuitively think of as neighborhood commercial is kind of in that 10, 20, maybe 30,000 square foot scale. We're not proposing that those be allowed kind of anywhere in a residential district, but in commercial districts, we wanna make those easier to build. And as we've talked about, kind of the promise or the opportunity that a new zoning map creates, we have an opportunity, right, to put new commercial-oriented districts on the map in areas where there might be kind of a dearth of that type of activity. I think really big benefit that we've got going for us is that we're actually already doing pretty well in terms of the amount of Chapel Hill, at least within town limits, that's within kind of that 10 to 15 minute bike ride of an existing commercial hub. There are some areas really kind of deep within neighborhoods that fall outside of those travel times. But we're doing really well. And so our baseline, I think, is not as bad as it may seem. It's something that we will continue to improve on and create more opportunities for neighborhood commercial. But we are starting at a pretty good place. And that's where things like the E2E Greenway network, continued investments in bike lanes and sidewalks. It's just going to make it easier and easier for people to get around and access existing commercial development. another thing um here and this is again kind of moving up the scale in terms of the the size of development that we're talking about um we've we perennially run into this problem that a lot of our multi-family projects around town even though kind of the r6 the residential six zoning district um would would be a really great district for them to to get rezoned into, it essentially precludes the opportunity for them to provide any sort of meaningful commercial development because R6, when it was originally conceived, really looked at kind of singular focus on residential development. And so we really want to make sure that we're shifting that paradigm that mixed use is kind of the default, that once you get into multifamily districts, mixed use is just, it's not even a question, right? It is a default part of how those districts are built out and what can be built in those districts. And this is just a seemingly small thing, but I wanted to highlight it. I know it's been talked about a bit. There's something that we've heard a lot of community interest in is the approach that the town takes towards daycares. I think so many of us have either direct or just ever so slightly tangential experience with understanding how difficult daycare and childcare can be in this area and what it means for somebody to have access to good childcare. We have traditionally made it really difficult to build daycare centers around town in our R1 and R2 zoning districts, which represent a very sizable chunk of town. You can only build those daycare centers on higher capacity roads, which puts a lot of land off limits for daycares. And so we are proposing to the new Luma will will lift that limit. Daycares would be allowed essentially anywhere in an R1 or R2 zoning district. the only kind of vestige of the old rule is that if a daycare is located on a local street, on a cul-de-sac, it's gonna be limited in size to 4,000 square feet, which is still, again, a sizable facility that could serve a good number of kids. But we just wanna make sure that it's It's not going to, again, kind of be outsized in its impacts on the neighbors. Any questions or comments or kind of feedback on any of these items? Yeah, Liz.

So I think this category is super important. And certainly, if successful, this is really a core piece of the complete community. and what I think we're looking for, but this is mostly allowing more commercial development. It isn't just because we allow it doesn't mean it's gonna be built. And I've just been impressed by project after project, our disappointment at the developers not taking advantage of already plenty of opportunities where we're pushing them requiring and they still are under utilizing the mixed use and so I think just going back to some of the sessions we held where we talked about well why does southern village work why you know what what worked what didn't work with blue hill it it requires more than zoning changes, the LUMO is not going to solve this. It can help it, it can certainly take barriers away, but it can't achieve what's needed to actually make this piece successful. And so I guess this is a bit of a statement as much as a question, but other things such as the small area planning needs to happen at the same time and the staff the council the town really needs if they want to take this seriously this is not going to be enough to do what i think you envision here although certainly necessary but not sufficient is what i would say and the lumo isn't going to solve it but I think to not be thinking at the same time of what else is going to happen would be we'll just end up with a lot of density and not have commercial. And that isn't really going to solve what we're looking for.

Yeah, I think Necessary but not sufficient should probably be like the tagline for all zoning ordinances, right? That's kind of the curse for a lot of planners. We have these grand visions for what the community could look like, but the regulatory tools that we have to enact that are really limited. So I think that's definitely the approach we're taking, and we approach it with that humility, really, right? That, like, we can open the door, but there's a lot more work that needs to be done, both on the town side and from the private development side to actually make that happen. Yeah, Jeff.

Yeah, question, which is not on the slide, and it might be a little in the weeds, and it's okay if you don't have the answer off the top of your head. But speaking of commercial uses in residential districts, the town's home occupation standards are reasonably strict with floor area limitations. Supposedly, if you're operating a business out of your house, you need a zoning permit. Theoretically, I'm violating LUMO by, you know, I work from home three days a week, so I'm engaged in an occupation at home. Is there going to be some liberalization of the town's home occupation standards?

Yes. We are We're basically gonna create, right now there are two official tiers of home occupations. There's just kind of home occupation and then major home occupation. The major home occupations are only allowed in a couple of zoning districts. So it's that home occupation tier that trips up a lot of folks. Some of the really onerous, some of the limitations of the home occupation, tier are things like you can only have one non-resident employee as part of your business. You can't have any external evidence of your business, no signage, nothing of that sort. There's folks like you, Jeff, that just work from home, but you're not necessarily running a business from your home. And so what we are proposing is to split that out a little bit. So create three tiers, essentially like an incidental home occupation, which is really just you're working from home. It doesn't really come with any restrictions. There's no permitting requirements. It's just acknowledging that that is just part and parcel of living in this kind of digital age. I think it's helpful to memorialize that because we do have folks sometimes for insurance purposes or tax purposes, other kind of legal purposes, they need to be able to point to something that says that, yeah, I'm authorized to be conducting my business out of my home. And so that's where it's helpful to kind of formally recognize that like incidental home occupation as a tier. Then we're taking that middle tier of just kind of normal home occupation and just making it a little bit more permissive. So saying that you can have, I think, up to three non-resident employees that you can have a little bit of modest signage. I think we're saying like, you can have one sign, can't be illuminated, but you can have a sign in your front yard. So just trying to, again, make it a little bit easier to do that sort of work out of your home, but still, you know, keeping kind of the core tenants of you don't want really intense commercial development that could be a nuisance to neighbors, trying to keep that intact, but at the same time make it all more usable. Yeah, John.

I wanted to quickly agree with the point that Liz made about necessary and that you agreed with already, Taz, necessary but not sufficient. In the end, I think... to get projects that have more mixed use component. I mean, our recent history with that in the town, let's say the last five years or so, has been basically need to require it or we don't get it. And the mechanism that we've been using to require it is conditional rezoning. I'm thinking of ORA. I'm thinking of South Creek. I think, you know, they probably anticipated that were they to come in with 700 units of residential with zero commercial, it would have been turned down. And so there's that expectation out there. And it sort of works in conditional rezoning. I think we'll probably need to continue doing that. And I think that there's a lot of untapped potential through whatever you want to call small area planning to identify areas where from a real estate economics perspective, you could make money and that's not most areas, but some areas you could make money with commercial use and essentially funding away without running afoul of the downzoning law to require some kind of commercial in those areas. Otherwise I fear we're just gonna get almost 100% residential on a lot of our projects going forward.

Yeah. Yeah. one thing i'll i'll say that you know we we've also seen the flip side right um 1600 north mlk um this project that that came in um had mandatory commercial space that just went unleashed for years and years, and they have to seek a modification to their entitlement to allow them to convert that to residential. So we know that it's kind of a mixed bag. The The other kind of important thing here is making sure that we don't lose existing neighborhood commercial. We don't want to create a displacement pressure on existing commercial. And so one of the things that we're proposing is that for two of our kind of strongest commercial zoning districts today, the community commercials of CC and neighborhood commercial NC zoning districts, we would actually, as they kind of move forward into the new LUMO, their Their baseline floor area ratio would actually stay the same as it currently is. It's not particularly high. You would get a significant jump in floor area ratio if any subsequent redevelopment of the site maintains or expands the amount of commercial floor area on the site. So it's a measure to really make sure that we're not backsliding with any of our existing development.

Yeah, that makes sense. I know that was a concern with Bluehill. You know, we've lost some commercial percentage-wise over time. So, okay, thanks.

All right, so like I mentioned, in the economic development and land use bucket, I think this was the kind of key interest we wanted to touch on. The other interest of making sure to align land use patterns with complete community principles, we just point to many other goals that I think collectively kind of speak to that interest. So moving on, The next four out of five now goal is this notion of built environment and the public realm. And so Council, again, identified several kind of more specific topic areas within this specific interest. Again, speaks to that notion of balancing uses for a complete community, supporting accessible civic spaces, good mobility infrastructure and connections, reduced dependence on parking, and then really meaningful building form and site design standards. So that first point, I think, again, this is an interest that I think mirrors some other interests that we've talked about. So that goal of supporting neighborhood scale commercial uses speaks really strongly to the idea that we need a balance of uses. And then more specifically, is this idea, and I already touched on it with another topic, is that mixed-use development will just kind of become the new default in basically all of our zoning districts. Obviously, as we get away from more heavily residential districts, the opportunities for commercial development become higher and higher. But the notion that any district other than maybe like our industrial district the notion that any district is really hemmed into a specific subset of uses um i think is is something that we're seeing that's kind of antithetical to this complete community balance of uses um actually before I know there's not a lot of material on this topic. I'm going to point to other points we've already discussed. Was there anything that you all wanted to check in on or provide feedback on to this point? So the next specific interest is really talking about access and distribution of civic spaces. And this has a similar dynamic to the one I mentioned around neighborhood scale commercial. On the one hand, we want to support existing civic spaces. And on the other hand, or other side of the coin, we want to promote the creation of new civic spaces. And so we're trying to hit both interests. On the point of adding new civic spaces, A really significant shift in the new LUMO is a move away from recreation space requirements and towards amenity space requirements for multifamily development and pretty critically here for just general non-residential commercial development. So these amenity space requirements would apply to commercial development in the same way they would to multifamily residential. Basically what the amenity space requirement calls for is some sort of mandatory improved open space on a site. That space can be private. We obviously cannot mandate that the space is public, but we do heavily incentivize amenity space that is kind of adjacent to the public realm. So a courtyard near the street, potentially a plaza near the street, you know, it can take a lot of different forms, but we want to create that space. Again, we can't require that it's publicly accessible, but we've seen kind of one-off developers that have an interest in adding to the public realm. they they oftentimes see a benefit to their own business um to make the space at least pseudo public right weaver street market is a perfect example um essentially like carbura's front yard um is not actually a public space um it's privately owned um but is used to great effect and really become part of the community um and so this is the groundwork for for things like that to again necessary but not sufficient to create those spaces. And then to that kind of flip side of the coin, making sure that we're increasing density near existing civic spaces, that we're creating more opportunities for more people to live near the things that we've already invested in. Any questions on either of those before moving to the next interest?

Just make the point like John made last time that these are the sorts of things that we traditionally, the council will negotiate over during the conditional zoning process.

Yeah. Yeah. And so this is it's an interesting kind of layering effect with conditional zoning because so on the one hand, as we talked about earlier, like how do we try to move by right development in the direction of providing community benefits? This is one of those tools that, again, we can't force them to make it public, but. just having it is a step in the right direction. So that's on the buy right end of the spectrum, but then these rules would still apply for projects that are going through a conditional zoning. So that now becomes the new baseline, right? Whereas before we might have to push and pull with the developer to even just think about incorporating some sort of plaza or open space into their site design. Now the presumption is that you're going to provide that. And if you're not, you have to make a case for not providing it. So it puts us on even stronger footing when we go into a conditional zoning. And you'll see that I think that dynamic play out with a lot of the new standards that they create kind of a new elevated baseline for projects that do go through conditional zoning. Um, okay. So next bit wanted to talk about, um, mobility and just connectivity around town. So, um, and this is something I touched on earlier of how do we get buy-right development to provide community benefits. A key part of that, we know that greenways are gonna be a really significant priority for the town in the future. And so we're throwing some really significant incentives at buy-right development in order to get them to provide greenways. And it's all tied to recreation space and amenity space. You'll notice I mentioned it's tied to amenity space. That's a direct trade-off with the previous point about creating civic spaces. So if we're going to incentivize, we've got to kind of have a baseline requirement and then find ways to offer relief from that requirement in order to get something that we couldn't otherwise get. If the developer provides, as I mentioned earlier, kind of a greenway that's in accordance with the town's adopted plans for greenways and they make it publicly accessible, they get some really significant relief from either rec space or amenity space requirements. Yeah, John.

So, Taz, I'm wondering how to compare this or how to think about this in relation to, say, a sidewalk requirement. So right now, if developer you know redevelops or a homeowner or whoever redevelops a piece of land that that's um zoned in such a way that requires sidewalk building like they have to build a sidewalk and there's no there's no incentive to do it it's a requirement right um is there an obstacle to using it seems like recently when we've had developers build greenways it's always been in the context of conditional rezoning and it's just a condition but uh is there like a constitutional impediment to you know would it be an exaction to require greenway because it's just wider than a sidewalk if under similar circumstances yeah so it what it all comes down to is whether the

the infrastructure is in the right of way or not. So yeah. And so that's where it's so much of it is it's not about the requirement to build the thing. It's about how publicly accessible is it? It's not particularly problematic for us to say you need to build a ten foot wide concrete path through your property, regardless of what you call it or who uses it. But it's that element of who gets to use it and with what level of freedom that gets us into like exaction territory or takings, right?

I see. Yeah. So if it's on the border of your property where your property meets the road.

Yep.

And it's a greenway as part of the greenway network, you could treat it like a sidewalk.

uh but if it's bifurcating your property in the middle yeah that'd be a taking yeah exactly okay um and i think i've got a bullet point that that speaks to that in uh a certain way yeah so this this third point about roadway improvements um that's where we we kind of take the like the sidewalk improvements but it kind of falls into this roadway improvements element that improvements within the right of way or fair game to require. we we would say that let's say the the e2e network map when that's completed if there's a stretch where they've identified that the the best alignment is actually along the road which can happen in some cases right sds is a great example um if if a development were to come in along one of those stretches um we would have kind of a strong foundation to say, no, you actually need to put in a 10 foot path or 14 foot, whatever the standard might be at the time in the right of way. Got it, thanks. And then, you know, kind of the flip sides of new infrastructure and new connections are the notion of giving more people opportunities to use existing infrastructure or new infrastructure um and so i think this is that point we've talked about um i recognize there's um we've received some really good feedback on on the viability of that option um especially as it relates to new greenways um so i think that's that's something that we'll continue to kind of noodle on whether it would harm other priorities if we tied additional density to new greenways um so we'll we'll certainly keep thinking on that one um any other questions on on these or feedback on these okay um okay so um the next one and i know that given my audience i i need to kind of Picking my skin a little bit for what I'm about to share. So there's this interest in reduced dependence on parking. We have, I think generally taken the approach that the best thing that the town can do to reduce car dependence and reduce dependence on parking is to promote development patterns that reduce the need for a car, right? to have development patterns that make it easier to use greenways, to make it easier to use transit, to make it easier to walk or bike to your destination of choice. We are not proposing to reduce parking maximums with the new LUMO. something we have we've kind of beat around a lot with the development community and the the overwhelming response that we're hearing is that if we reduce parking maximums we're squeezing folks between parking regulation and investor or lender requirements and It's not a place that we want to put folks that we know are going to have to be kind of necessary partners in a lot of what we're hoping to get with new development in town. So again, heavy emphasis on reducing the need for cars. But at this point, we're not proposing to reduce those parking maximums.

I get it. I'm not going to bite your head off on this at ease, but I wonder, is there any precedent for using incentives here, incentive requirements? Is there a way to incentivize lower parking ratios for developers who might need the incentive to do it and might be able to respond to it?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, we could, we've, you know, we have kind of a, a bag to pull from when it comes to what incentives could look like. And some of those could certainly be tied to a commitment written into some sort of restriction on the property that their parking will be capped out or capped at a certain level.

In a way, it's like the reverse of what you're proposing with small scale projects, incentives for in terms of dimensional and setback requirements for affordable housing. It's actually the same issue because parking adds cost for the end user, whether they're a renter or they're buying the unit. And one way, a pretty effective way to promote more market rate affordable housing is to get the parking ratios down. And if there's a way to incentivize it, I would look at it conceptually as part of the package of affordable housing incentives.

Yeah, I think we can explore what it would look like to, we've already identified some incentives for energy efficient building design and things of that sort. We could look into what it could mean to add parking to the mix.

Just to add to that, the unbundling, which is not something you could put into the regulation, but degree of thinking of how to include that really does help the renter or buyer, as well as reduce costs, reduce parking, et cetera.

Yeah, I was thinking about that. I couldn't figure out a way to get into the LUMO, like you're saying, Liz. I just couldn't think of a feasible way Put that in the code.

Yeah, have to figure out some incentive. But I, yeah, I just keep thinking of the Wegmans building like a parking lot that seemed to be 50% large and demanding the council extend their maximum parking so that they could waste, build that massive lot. Anyway, yeah.

Yeah, and I mean, one thing we are proposing to do is at least somewhat try to improve the landscaping standards. So if you are going to build a parking lot, we're increasing the number of trees that you need to provide, making it somewhat more inconvenient to the benefit of the folks that would use the parking lot. Same with parking structures, right? That there would be screening requirements and some additional costs placed on those types of construction. Yeah, Jeff.

Yeah, not to belabor the point. You often see incentives for reducing the minimum amount of parking that's required because developers don't want to produce as much as the ordinance requires, but then that requires you to have some minimum, which we obviously don't want to have. I don't know of any, I can't think of any incentives to provide reduced parking. I mean, they'd have to be some sort of benefit that they would get, you know, extra development entitlement. Just thinking about it, I thought the Wegmans demanding additional parking that they, surprise, realized they didn't actually need was dumb. On the other hand, I know they're actively marketing half of that parking lot, which could be sold off and be some business. I get annoyed when somebody has to build a parking deck that's larger than is needed because those are very expensive very carbon intensive and aren't going away within 40 years if it's some additional asphalt parking spaces that they want that's easy enough to repurpose in the future yeah yeah and that's where um

A lot of these other ideas of making it easier to build by right, it would be great if the Wegmans satellite parking lot could redevelop totally by right. It has some weird, I think they've already kind of severed it from their existing special use permit. So it is at this point, I think, standing essentially on its own as land that could develop by right if we put in place some good rules for that. Yeah, Liz.

Here's an incentive that you could add. Well, not an incentive. It's something that you could... If you could come up with a lower maximum and anything... say the top 20% of the maximum has to be done with impervious parking, which is obviously more expensive. So they either build something that is not going to be as negative to the watershed, et cetera, or they just don't do it because that extra 20% is expensive. And that would be a win-win.

Yeah. My wheels are... I'm going to try to stop my wheels turning because that's a very interesting idea. And I don't want to get sidetracked. But yeah, we can definitely look into basically making, without changing the parking maximums, change the incremental costs for whatever that...

Right, the top quarter, the top 20%. Yeah.

Yeah, cool, thank you. All right, I'm gonna move on to next bit. And I'm sorry I've gotten through like 40 slides with no pictures. I've got a couple of graphics for y'all on this one. So one of the really major changes that the new LUMO is gonna help implement is, bringing additional elements of building and site design regulation into the mix. We've heard a lot of interests in just good urban form. I think that's something that we can regulate to a certain extent, as long as we take an eye towards, let's regulate in a way that protects us against worst case scenarios, rather than let's attempt to regulate our way into kind of a perfectly designed site. And so with that in mind, we're looking to implement kind of a variety of different urban form and building mass related rules in the new LUMO. first being maximum building width. I think the CDC has long kind of advocated for maximum building width rules. I think the new limo is actually gonna come in more conservative than what the CDC had advocated for for a long time at kind of a 250 foot maximum building width with some opportunities to articulate a building in a way that allows you to go beyond that maximum building width. So what this example shows is that if you have a segment of the building that maxes out that maximum building width, you can then add an open space. And there are minimum dimensional requirements for how big that open space would need to be in order for you then to continue the building. but still technically fall within the maximum building width. We see this as not just an aesthetic concern. I think that's something we're trying to really be mindful here of that purely aesthetic concerns are not something that the LUMO should be regulating. When you limit building width, One of the opportunities that you create is better connectivity through a site, better permeability, the opportunity for people to walk through a site in a more meaningful way, fewer blocks, blocks upon blocks of development. that don't give people an opportunity to kind of get off the street. So there's a lot of kind of lived experience, experiential benefit to a building with maximum. Another requirement that we're proposing to add to the new LUMO are going to be for these larger scale projects, limitations on how much parking can be placed between the building and the street. This is really kind of an evolution of, or just kind of like a build two zone in its simplest form. I think as we were, iterating through what a build-to zone could look like. What we really came down to is the biggest thing that we're trying to avoid is having kind of a sea of parking between the building and the street. And so there's gonna be these limitations on parking between the building and the street. What it would basically boil down to is that in these zones, in these zones that are kind of clearly between the building and the street, there'd be a maximum width of pavement and parking that you would be able to put in that zone. Because we still want to allow folks to have, you know, vehicular circulation around the site if they need it, but they wouldn't be able to have more than one or two lanes of driveways and certainly no more than like one bay of parking along a portion of that street facing facade. So it gets really in the weeds with how that will work. But core idea, we really want to limit how much parking is between people on the street and the buildings that they're trying to get to. Another similar idea is this notion of blank walls um i think there are you know pretty noticeable examples around town of you might be walking along sidewalk and for kind of an uncomfortably long distance you are just staring at a blank brick wall or blank concrete wall creates a less hospitable environment adds to just kind of the building that can impact urban heat effects. And so we're proposing some limits on how far you can go with a blank wall before you have windows or doors or trees that kind of shield the blank wall. Again, all with kind of an eye towards let's improve the pedestrian experience. Already mentioned amenity space requirements. Again, the idea here is just to require that whether it's multifamily residential or commercial development, that they are creating some spaces that are outdoors, that have opportunity, albeit not the requirement to be public spaces. Another kind of key element is the notion of active depth requirements. Just like the parking between the building and the street requirement, what this really boils down to is a way of guarding against a lot of ground floor parking in a building that's right up against the street. We recognize that that's kind of necessary with a lot of one over five, one over something construction where you've got podium parking and then construction on top of that. we can mitigate that, right? We can have a requirement that says that some portion of that podium parking needs to be wrapped with an active use, again, with an eye towards promoting that pedestrian experience. There's also some kind of tweaked standards around building mass. Step backs and building height are or a new rule that will be implemented in a lot of zoning districts, basically saying that a building can go no more than usually four stories before there has to be some sort of change in the articulation of the building, all towards an eye with kind of promoting best practices in urban form. That's one of those rules where I think it does veer more towards the aesthetic, but we're creating enough options, enough opportunities in how people meet that rule that's not going to be overly prescriptive. Any questions on or feedback on these building and site design standards? I will say, and John, I'll get to your question in just a second. I think the timing was a little off, but the town urban designer, Brian Peterson, has provided a write-up on looking at building and site design standards in the new ordinance. and that's been shared I believe is kind of supplemental materials to tomorrow's town council meeting so it should already be on the you know out as part of the the agenda for tomorrow's council meeting but I can make sure to share it with you all as well so you have that to reference yeah John

I don't have the technical expertise to evaluate these design standards, but I understand what you're trying to do, which is protect the pedestrian realm. And it seems logical and I'm supportive of that effort, even though I can't really add value to it. One thing I did want to ask about is procedurally whether the town urban designer, currently Brian, should be mentioned by position in the Lumos somewhere, maybe in the context of conditional rezoning? So the reason I ask it is because since Brian came on board, he seems to do really good work and add value. And oftentimes, we don't need to require anything. He just delivers some wisdom to a developer who doesn't maybe have the scale to bring somebody like him in house or consult with somebody like him. And we're basically giving them free business advice, like how to make your building more attractive to potential tenants or buyers. And so they love it. In other cases, a developer will come in and they seem to want to do something a little more cookie cutter and he has great comments and they basically ignore it while saying that he is on board with everything they're doing. You know, they're kind of playing it both ways. And, um, and there's not really like a procedural mechanism for Brian to dispute that or to follow up on whether in fact the changes that they made to the plan have anything to do with what he told them. And so I just wonder if there's a way I've always thought that if we're going to use them, it ought to be a little more buttoned up in terms of how the process works. And there ought to be like either not do it or do it with more teeth. And I wonder if you've given any thought to formalizing his role in some way, I don't know how, in the LUMO.

Yeah, what it really boils down to is delegation of authority. And when a governing body in North Carolina delegates authority to administrative staff, they have to do that within the bounds of kind of clear guiding principles or guiding standards. And I think you just hit on kind of why that ends up being a really difficult dynamic then with a position like the urban designer, that where there are things that we can clearly create standards around, we're moving in that direction. the value add of somebody like an urban designer is that they speak to the things that we can't put clear standards around. And so I think unfortunately, that role is always gonna have to live kind of outside of any sort of official process in the ordinance. But I think we have, it is unequivocal how much value the town has received from having that sort of collaboration. And so I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon.

Okay, next.

Yeah. Liz.

So I had a question, but I will first build on what John said. which I agree about Brian Peterson's comments. When we see them, they're always very helpful. I will also say that we did have a process that did require the developers to address comments, and that was with the CDC. As the liaison to the CDC for many years, I watched developers interact with them, and I know that there were many people frustrated that the CDC slowed the process down. But I can tell you just having watched from the outside, invariably, the CDC had a huge amount of professional expertise that they gave free of charge. And these projects, when they would come back, were much better projects because of getting this input from the CDC. So it is something that we have opted for streamlining for because we want to go faster, but we did have that process before, which had whatever. But my question was, I know you all spent a lot of time developing like a standards book on design, and I'm just not, I can't remember what the typology, I can't remember the name of it, but how does that interact with this process? Because I know there's like a whole book of options, but I don't know the interaction with the LUMO.

Yeah, so it was the, I'm forgetting, the typology resource guide or something of that sort. With that document, I think we had always positioned it as it was first and foremost like a research document, that it was... a way of understanding what are best practices in urban design, what are things that can be regulated, And it will continue to live on as kind of a resource that we'll point folks to. I think we have found that, you know, Brian is just as good, if not better, than pointing somebody to a document. I would actually... amend my statement to say that Brian is always going to be better than pointing somebody to any sort of static document. So it exists out there. I think we're just finding it to be less useful in the long run than it maybe could have been. And I think, Liz, you're mentioning the CDC. I think it's really good. I'm glad you brought that up because the CDC's involvement in conditional zoning projects wasn't formalized in LUMA. That was actually kind of a, it was a norm, right, that council expected projects to go to the CDC before coming to council. um and i think over time what that's kind of evolved into is is essentially an expectation that you have really meaningful conversations with the urban designer um and so we've I think because it's been kind of more norms based, it gives us that first when it was the CDC and now when it's a staff position, it gives us that ability to kind of build up these expectations, even if we don't necessarily have a strong footing for it to be in the ordinance. OK. OK, so I will move on to the next bit here, and that brings us to our fifth of the five topics. So thank you guys for bearing with me. Not that we're keeping score, but I think this topic actually has the most independent kind of bullet points within it. So unsurprisingly, there's a lot to talk about when it comes to environment and resilience, because that is one of kind of the if we were ranking among some of these priorities we know that environment and resilience is is top of mind for a lot of folks and for the community writ large um so there's a lot here um you know tied to rcd tree protection storm water sustainability and resilience then other kind of conservation strategies so i'll walk through each of these um in turn um i think there's we're front loaded on the the detail items one through four one through three really have the most detail four through six kind of taper off a little bit so um looking first at the the rcd um the kind of Main interest here is that we continue to respect the RCD and the ecosystem services that it helps to support through town. And so right off the bat, there is no reduction in RCD buffer widths or really any of the substantive standards that are housed within the RCD rules. We are proposing, as I'll get into, some tweaks around the margins, but at baseline, RCD rules are kind of staying as is. A small but I think meaningful improvement that we're making relative to the RCD is actually with our lighting standards. Our lighting standards currently don't really account for RCD within a property. our lighting standards basically say that at the property line you can't exceed a certain lighting level but if you have rcd on your property you can you can light up that that rcd to really any level as long as at the property line you're not exceeding the mandated levels and we know that that can be really disruptive to one of the core functions of the RCD, which is to serve as habitat protection. And so we're incorporating some standards into our lighting rules that say that at the boundary of the RCD, you've got to control your lighting levels, again, to try to promote RCD as what it is, which is meaningful habitat in a lot of instances. next topic and this is something that has come up from time to time with individual conditional zonings is the notion of stormwater control measures in the rcd our rcd rules as they exist today allow stormwater control measures in the upper zones of the rcd but we we often hear kind of consternation about placing a stormwater pond or something like that in the RCD. And so the way we're hoping that the new LUMO will address that interest is to actually say that if a development is going to have stormwater infrastructure in the RCD, has to be green stormwater infrastructure. It has to be something like a constructed wetland, a bioswale, other more kind of biomimicry type infrastructure. It can't just be a sterile stormwater pond. That's the baseline requirement. We wanted to build in some flexibility because we know that one of the things that green stormwater infrastructure really relies on and what sets green stormwater infrastructure apart from something like a retention pond is infiltration, the ability for the water that's held in that stormwater infrastructure, whatever it may be, to be released back into the ground. If you've tried to garden anywhere in Chapel Hill, you know we hit clay pretty quickly in town. And so infiltration isn't always gonna be easy to do. There's also issues with like water tables and just other concerns that might make it really impossible to put green stormwater infrastructure in the RCD. And so we are creating a little bit of an escape hatch that if you want to put stormwater control measures in the RCD, but because of the water table or soil types or anything like that, there's actually land outside of the RCD that's better suited to green stormwater infrastructure. We basically allow you to trade that as long as you're doing some green stormwater infrastructure on your site, you're then allowed to put more typical stormwater infrastructure in the RCD. So again, that's a very convoluted way to say we are trying to push folks in the direction of if you're doing stormwater control measures in the RCD, we're going to push really hard for that to be green stormwater infrastructure. One, and these next two bits are, I mentioned, we're making some kind of surgical tweaks to RCD rules. The one thing that we are changing or proposing to change in terms of the scope of RCD is culverts. As many of you may know, culverts are just underground pipes, underground conveyances of water. And despite the fact that the RCD regulations explicitly exempt man-made conveyances, they don't specifically list culverts as one of the man-made conveyances that they're exempting. And this has just led to a lot of confusion, a lot of uncertainty about the scope of RCD regulations. And so we're just clarifying that you've got a piped underground conveyance, we're not going to treat that in the same way as we would a natural stream. And then the last kind of tweak that we're making is trying to balance the goals of the RCD with kind of procedural hurdles. And that's specifically for kind of small residential projects. So this is property on which there's a single family home up to a fourplex. What we're proposing is, again, kind of a de minimis exemption for certain permitting requirements. And what this would apply to is if you're doing 30 square feet of impervious surface or 60 square feet of land disturbance, We're not gonna require that you get a survey. We're not gonna kind of impose some of the same application requirements, some of the same standards that we would for a larger project. This is a request that really came out of our staff that work closely with homeowners. What they were finding was that you would have a family that needed to replace an HVAC unit on their site or on their home. And they were having to go through really extensive permitting, really kind of onerous permitting just to be able to, again, put in a new HVAC, put in a small garden shed, really small stuff. And so we're proposing kind of an opportunity for them to move forward without quite as much paperwork, essentially. But again, limiting it to just the outer zones of the RCD. So we're really treating that streamside zone, the 50 feet closest to a stream, as inviolable as far as this exemption would go. Any questions on any of the RCD or any feedback on any of the RCD provisions here.

Liz. So generally, I appreciate I know there were some other routes you could have taken, and I appreciate it looks like you really thought hard about this. I would say for the green stormwater infrastructure, which I like that idea, One possibility for those that appeal this and say they want to do what you said of swapping the green and the regular, you could, I think one thing that is not uncommon is to require some that the work that they do outside the RCD be biodiversity positive or habitat positive, so they actually have to do some compensation for going into the RCD so it's not a direct swap, so that there's a cost to them of doing that and they think twice before applying for that sort of thing. And then the small projects. That seems reasonable, but I'm guessing the devil is in the detail what really is allowed, etc. But I'll wait and see the regulations when they come out. But I mean, I get that there's some small things, but we'll see what it looks like when it comes out.

Yeah. And one thing I'll just mention on that last point, we The proposal isn't to change what's allowed in the RCD, like the activities that are allowed in the RCD. It would be to say, of the things that are already allowed in the RCD, if it's small enough, the permitting requirements would be different.

Yeah. Yeah, I get that. Yep. Okay. Cool.

Well, thank you, Liz. Any other feedback or questions or comments on the RCD? Okay. All right, moving right along. Next bit really covers tree canopy. And we have... We've heard very strong policy guidance from council and from you all around tree protection, tree canopy. I think that the new LUMOs is gonna find some really key ways to meet those interests. One of the first things is kind of a lesson learned from, projects around town where development along the periphery of the project has kind of endangered neighbors. And so, The new LUMO is going to have provisions, essentially this whole new set of standards tied to what we're calling a life safety buffer, that if there are trees along the property line that are tall enough to endanger neighboring buildings, that the developer needs to take steps to either protect those trees or, and this is I think the unfortunate kind of trade-off, either protect the trees or proactively remove them. But they are not allowed to allow those trees to be impacted to the point that they then become a risk to neighboring properties. One additional step that we're taking or proposing to take for larger developments, so developments over an acre, is that it's not just about protecting trees that are fully on the developing site, but also protecting trees that are on the adjacent property, but that have root zones that extend into the developing site. That's a major kind of... blind spot for our current rules. So we don't have any provisions that offer protection to trees, not on the developing site, but that underground, right, extend into the developing site. And so similar kind of process would apply if there are adjacent buildings that are close enough to the property line, and if there are trees that are big enough that they could risk damaging those adjacent buildings, the developer would have to take steps to protect the critical root zone of those trees. And it ends up being, I think fairly in practice, it ends up being a pretty modest impact to the developing site. You're looking at maybe 10 or 15 feet off of the property line at most that they would need to kind of maintain a no disturbance zone in order to meaningfully protect offsite trees. And that's probably in like a worst case scenario. Um, but again, with a really meaningful benefit to, to neighbors, um, another thing we're looking to do with the new LUMO is actually inject a level of mandatory tree conservation. I think it's a popular misconception about our current tree protection ordinance that it requires conservation of any existing trees. The current tree protection ordinance just does not require that. You can be fully compliant with today's tree protection ordinance and fully clear cut your site as long as you then plant replacement trees. So what we're proposing is that for larger development sites, again, over an acre, that they would be required to protect and conserve at least 10% of any existing canopy. It's a relatively modest number. I mean, we know it's a modest number. um because that can have a significant impact on site design and we don't want to um unduly impact site design through this standard um but that that ten percent has good precedent it's what's used in raleigh um i think raleigh actually triggers the requirement at a higher threshold they don't doesn't kick in there until you're doing a two acre site or larger um so we're using a similar standard, but having it kick in earlier than our neighbors. We're also, again, we've heard this interest. Oh, sorry, Mike, I didn't notice your hand was up. Happy to jump to you for a second. You're muted, Mike.

Sorry. Is there a process that, you know, be provided to developers that determines what is a tree that can endanger nearby building versus a tree that is providing canopy? Are they making that decision? We're giving them guidelines or do we have actually someone that goes on site to say, hey, this has got to go, this one will stay. How's that going to be enforced?

yeah so one of the things we currently require for a lot of different development is a tree survey that before they come in and start working on a site, they currently have to identify all the rare and specimen trees, basically the larger trees on their site. They're free to then cut down all those trees, but they at least have to tell us on the front end where those trees are. And so these additional requirements would basically build off of that existing mechanism that you would have to identify the trees on your property, We would say that a tree poses a risk to a neighboring property. The kind of clear metric that that translates into is if the tree is taller, if the height of the tree exceeds the distance between the tree and a neighboring building, right? So if in the instance, the tree fell, it's tall enough that it could hit a neighboring building. So that's kind of like the clear metric that we would establish in the ordinance and property owners would be responsible for identifying all of those trees on that tree survey.

Okay. Thank you.

Yep.

Just to follow up on this. So then they had the option of either protecting the tree or taking it down. I mean, most of these developers will just take it down. It's way easier to just take the tree down and now I don't have to deal with it. Shouldn't there be some sort of disincentive? some cost to them taking it down so that there's a preference to them actually protecting the tree and and keeping away from that that's one and two what i didn't understand is if the tree is on the neighbor's property can they just go in and take out the neighbor's tree no no no not at all so the um the

The protect or take down only applies to trees on the developing site. For trees on the neighbor's property, it is purely a protect. What if it's split? I'm sorry?

What if it's on both properties?

Yeah, I mean, unless it was entirely on the developing site, the neighbor would have a property interest in it. Tree law is a surprisingly fraught topic of practice, but we would say... If it's fully on one property or the other, or excuse me, the only instance in which you could remove it is if it's fully on the developing property.

Is there anything else? I mean, if they go take it down, is there any disincentive towards doing that versus just trying to protect it?

Yep, there is. And so this incentive would apply to, it wouldn't apply to all trees, because again, we recognize that not all trees offer the same kind of ecosystem services, and we want to kind of strike that balance between flexibility in protecting environmental assets. So the disincentive would apply specifically to rare and specimen trees. And what we're proposing is that the calculation for whether you're meeting your overall tree canopy requirement, we're basically proposing to kind of play with those numbers a bit that rather than saying that every square foot of rare or canopy, rare or specimen tree canopy, if you remove some of that canopy, it counts double against you. So you're basically creating a deficit faster if you are cutting down rare and specimen trees. Same with significant tree stands, which are defined as contiguous areas of trees that are at least a certain size. We would basically count those more than just a tree kind of a field. And then on the flip side, if you are protecting rare and specimen trees or protecting a significant tree stand, that counts more towards some of these other standards. So the mandatory conservation or the just like your general canopy requirement preservation is always going to we've kind of tweaked the numbers in a way that preservation is always gonna kind of give you a head start and cutting down trees is always gonna kind of handicap you so another important interest that we've heard from Council is this notion that we really need to stop putting single-family homes on quite as much of a pedestal as we currently do. We heard a little bit of that this evening. And one of the ways in which we're proposing to do that is to have new construction single-family homes subject to tree canopy requirements. They're currently not subject to any tree canopy requirements. And so this would be an opportunity to put that in place. Another important interest we've heard around tree canopy is to have kind of a tiered system where single family homes have a more not more onerous, but just a more stringent canopy requirement than duplexes or triplexes, other missing middle housing. And so that factors into here as well. So I think the numbers are a 30% tree canopy requirement for a new single family home, but just a 20% canopy requirement for a new duplex or triplex. And then Within that tiered requirement or tiered system, there would be exemptions for kind of small versions of either of those things. So a single family home of less than 2,000 square feet or a duplex, triplex or fourplex of less than 4,000 square feet would be exempt from those tree canopy requirements. So it's all kind of tiered towards the notion of exempt the smaller stuff, put more significant standards on larger single family homes, and then taper things down to help support missing middle housing. And then I think already kind of jumped the gun on this last bit about rare and specimen trees and significant tree stands. So again, if you conserve or protect either of these, you get a pretty significant kind of head start towards some of these other standards. And if you cut down, um a rare specimen tree or a significant tree stand that puts you in the hole uh faster and you just have to do more than to to get out of that hole um and then last thing it's already been mentioned but bears repeating uh street tree requirements would be coming into play um for for a lot of new development yeah john

So one of the issues that came up in the Complete Community project when Jennifer Giesemann was in town was this notion of respect for topography. And it came up again. The CDC a couple years ago, maybe it was three years ago now, put together some design guidelines that they just sort of published. They were non-binding sort of guidelines to provide more transparency into what developers should expect by way of comments from that group. And one of their core notions was, you know, this is a town that is not flat. And sometimes there's a almost like thoughtless default practice among developers of, quote, tabletopping a site where they go in and they just flatten the thing, even if it's on a slope and they put retaining walls around it, because it may be easier to construct something on that, just easier. know we had this interesting case of uh what's now coker place uh corner of somerset and north estes where it was a big point of discussion the cdc and at the planning commission where are you going to tabletop this site you're going to try to work with the grade because there's not a flat site and developer gave some assurances actually they gave very explicit assurances in a council meeting where they were approved that they were going to step down the buildings and then they violated that i mean just totally violated it and they can because it was never reduced to the code. It was just not put in as a condition. And I wonder, you know, what can be done about that? Have you given thought to, this is very interrelated with these tree protection requirements. Like one of the reasons trees come down is because it's just easier to tabletop a site. So while we're protecting trees, I wonder if there's a way, and maybe there is or isn't, I don't know technically how you do it, it would be nice to have some incentive where it's not really necessary to flatten a site to not actually do that.

Yeah, it's, that's a really difficult trade off because it, and it, it highlights even within the realm of environmental protection, there can be competing interests, right? That one of the, what we've found is that one of the, A reason that a lot of sites require so much grading is our stormwater requirements. A lot of times you've got to grade a site in order to get the water to flow the right way, to be the most economical with the number of SCMs that you're providing. And so, yeah, it is just, again, even within the realm of environmental protection, we see these trade-offs. But again, something we could look at. It is admittedly not, I think, an interest that's surfaced in conversation so far about limiting grading, but we can- Maybe it's just me.

It's probably not a feasible way to do it, if I had to guess. I just thought I'd ask to see if there's anything. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, Liz.

Well, I think that's interesting, John. It's not just you. But this is a slightly related point, and it also goes back to the RCD previous slide. Really appreciate that Chapel Hill has really invested a lot in protecting the RCD, and that's really beyond many of the peer communities. But going beyond not all of the natural areas that are of highest value are in our CDs. And we put a huge amount of effort into the natural areas map and also being involved in some of these larger initiatives. A lot of these regulations that you've got are just across the board or even what John just brought up. Some sites, it really doesn't matter if you grade them or not. They're pretty low quality sites. I think we looked at one of the last ones we looked at up, you know, sort of up at the top of the hill where MLK and the daycare center. Yeah, Weaver Dairy. I mean, so Has there been any discussion of, say, conservation overlays so that the requirements could be less in places? You know, you could not impose certain requirements in places that really are of less significance. But those areas that are part of a connected corridor, which do have important connected canopies, et cetera, are held to a higher level. requirements than those that really are more urban, et cetera, et cetera. Has there been any discussion of that? Essentially some sort of conservation overlay, which could also be related to a stormwater overlay. I mean, one could work at trying to combine the two or have complementary ones.

Yeah. There has been a lot of discussion about whether we have the data that we would need to think about the boundaries of some sort of conservation overlay. And that's before we even get to the legal ramifications of a conservation overlay. The first question is, do we have meaningful data that would help us identify the boundaries of a conservation overlay? And I think what's really come to light is that the data that we have is not specific enough to be translated into regulatory lines on a map. You know, the data from Triangle Connectivity Collaborative, formerly, you know, Nuho Group, we love that data. It is a integral part of the natural features model, much better than like, data from Esri or some of these other national firms. But even that data comes with the caveat that it's gotta be ground truth, right? That you've gotta verify the actual conditions on the ground. And so the, from a logistical perspective, right? We would be looking at essentially having to conduct habitat surveys or other ecological assessments of any land that's kind of highlighted in the Triangle Connectivity Collaborative data, which then trickles into its own kind of set of challenges. If you're a property owner and we say, hey, can we enter your land with the intent of figuring out whether we should place additional restrictions on it, that's going to be a really fraught conversation. So it is really helpful data, but just not for that particular purpose. The way in which it is helpful, though, is I think something like Coker Place is a great example, right? And we are doing this actively, right? When a project comes in for a conditional zoning, we have now incorporated the natural features model into our analysis. We're looking at the underlying data, trying to understand, is there a likelihood of there being some of these critical environmental features on the site and working with developers if we think that there is. I think a clear example of that coming to fruition was the Caraway expansion. That was actually an instance where original plan for the site showed an SCM in the RCD. There was really strong council interest in getting that SCM out of the RCD. And it was backed up by the natural features model, right? That the underlying data showed, even within the kind of fuzziness of the data, it said, hey, there's a very high probability that a portion of the site is ecologically sensitive. Whereas another portion of the site is not so much. And so we were able to work with the developer to really like heavily rearrange their site. But it was within that negotiated context, which I think is the, that's the level at which like fuzzy data can be. Yeah.

I mean, I get your point and I understand that the individual, uh, homeowner, but Chapel Hill actually has a lot better data than much of the world that, that uses this sort of data for a lot of different land use planning. I'm, I don't think it's quite as fuzzy as, as you're sort of portraying it and it's, this is only getting better with our, essentially with AI and our ability to be able to, um, essentially be able to, what's the word I'm looking for? Essentially, well, anyway, it's getting better and better. And I actually think we have pretty impressive data right now. And there's a lot of it has to do with tree cover. The intersection between tree cover and hydrology and land use just at that basic level is pretty much 90% of what we're talking about. And then when you start to look at certain rare and endangered species, that's maybe the 1%, very important. That's what, yeah, you're gonna have a hard time getting to that level, but 90% of what you need is really already easily available. So, but you know, I can put more comments in. I'm disappointed not to see anything from the natural areas being incorporated in any way so far, but maybe it's in there and it just didn't make the slides.

Yeah, it's not. I mean, I will be very candid with you about that. again, what our confidence in the data is doesn't rise to the level where we think at this point, the data lends itself to being translated into some sort of kind of clear regulatory tool, which is not to say, and I appreciate you highlighting that the data only keeps getting better. And so It's not a matter of if, I think it's a matter of when the data gets to the point that it gives us the necessary level of confidence. The conversation can definitely continue.

Maybe a good office hours discussion for this summer.

Right. And I'll just double down so I don't go over this again. When we get to the slide on flood resilience, I think our data is even stronger because we're talking about tree cover, hydrology, etc. I think we could easily begin to think about stormwater overlays that help us from essentially overdeveloping places upstream that are really critical for downstream.

Cool. Well, thank you guys very much for the feedback on that. Next point, perfect segue, Liz, is stormwater requirements. And this is something that, again, we're really kind of continuing to push on and build on some really great momentum that the town's already had over the last few years. So first, continuing this theme of kind of addressing single-family homes, are looking to kind of increase the scope of single family homes that are subject to stormwater requirements. The threshold today is that a single family home, an individual single family home, not part of a subdivision, is only subject to stormwater requirements if it involves 20,000 square feet of land disturbance or more. as a very large lot single family home. And so the new LUMO is gonna drop that threshold down to 12,000 square feet. It will bring more single family homes into the fold, potentially be a little bit of a pressure that helps to control land disturbance, even on larger sites for those marginal projects that, you know, Some clever site design could mean the difference between having to do stormwater or not. It's some pressure on the not side. We do have to be really careful with not going too far with not even single-family homes, but imposing stormwater regulations in too decentralized of a way. It raises a lot of issues if we're getting to the point where we've got a lot of decentralized stormwater management, ponds, stormwater infrastructure that has to be inspected and maintained all at significant costs sometimes to both the property owner and then administrative kind of difficulty to the town. it's a balancing act but what we're proposing with um single-family homes moves in the direction of getting more single-family homes kind of under the umbrella of stormwater management um the other thing we're proposing is um pretty significant expansion of the 100-year stormwater standard um what is essentially The current state of that requirement is that it only applies to development that goes through a conditional zoning or a special use permit. That was a major change that was made a couple of years ago, but it was limited in scope. And so what the new LUMO will include is, or what the draft LUMO will include, is the notion that subdivisions with four or more lots or essentially any other development with more than 40,000 square feet of land disturbance will need to treat the 100-year storm. And below that, we would still be keeping the 25-year storm standard in place. So again, an opportunity to have more development do more on the stormwater front. This is a really hard conversation on this point in particular, because this is, of all the things we're talking about in the new LUMO, this is one of the few that is just a very clear additional cost that we are imposing on new development. And so, you know, one of the things still trying to calibrate is with subdivisions, for example, is four lots the correct threshold at which to kick a subdivision into the 100-year storm requirement? Or should it be somewhere higher than that? That it's not until you're talking about a pretty significant that they're required to meet the 100-year storm with the understanding that they would still be required to meet the 25-year storm. It's not the 100-year or nothing, but it's just about when do we start to ratchet up that 100-year requirement. So I think we have done a lot of outreach and kind of kicking the tires on this with the development community. We know that this is going to be something that there's going to be continued significant discussion on because of those really significant trade-offs that are associated with it.

Have you considered not making it a size change? but where the site is, whether it's 100-year or not. I mean, there are places that might be 40,000 square feet or larger, which if they flood, it's a very little consequence to them or those that are potentially downstream, whereas others are in very vulnerable and key locations. And it seems like that should be the distinction, not how big the lot is or how many homes there are.

Yeah, it absolutely should be the distinction. And that's the direction we hope to go in. To your point, Liz, about the availability of data, that's definitely something that is knowable to a high degree of certainty. We just don't have that in our hand, right? We haven't done the studies that would be needed to know that. But we know it's knowable, you know, the prospects of like a townwide digital twin of flow rate analyses around town. There's a lot of good options. We just have to get the funding to do it.

But I might be able to help you with that. But that's during office hours.

Yeah, no, absolutely. We would love to talk about that. Um, And the other final thing I'll just mention on stormwater is this notion of downstream impacts. It is a relatively simple add-on to the stormwater impact studies that developers are already required to do for them to consider what the impact to downstream properties will be. And so we are incorporating that into the standards for larger development that they've got to identify kind of downstream properties that could be impacted and get an understanding of what those impacts might be. This is largely a belt and suspenders provision because the just kind of underlying logic of how our stormwater standards are designed really mitigates against the possibility of downstream impacts. But requiring this sort of analysis is a really good way of making very sure that that logic is kind of holding true in specific cases. So all told, it's a set of opportunities to beef up our stormwater requirements. knowing that there are smarter ways to do it. We just need to get there. Yeah, John.

So I was interested in Liz's comment about maybe distinguishing between areas where the flow of water from a property is innocuous versus has huge consequences. And I understand your response to that. Maybe another topic for office hours this summer. Get some free advice from Liz. Knows a lot about this stuff. I just wanted to say as conversations go forward on where to draw the threshold for how small is too small to have stormwater requirements. One thing that's sort of bothered me hearing this conversation over the years is that people tend not to talk about existing development and all future development is at some point in the future going to be existing development as suffering consequences from water that flows off a property. So it's easy to say, well, this is going to be a cost and maybe prohibitive cost to certain affordable housing projects if we add this expense of doing stormwater infrastructure. But what's unsaid is that at some point, when such projects are built, they will become existing projects. And then other projects will get created upstream. And if those projects are allowed to cumulatively keep adding stormwater externalities to the town, then the affordable housing we built today is going to get flooded. And whatever other housing exists today, affordable or not, is going to get flooded if it's in a sensitive area. So it's not as simple as saying, oh, you're putting a cost on future development. What you're doing is shifting costs shifting costs from from future development to existing development and which category you're in is constantly changing as time passes so i just want to make a plea for what when this is considered um we need to be rigorous about who is bearing the cost because the cost never ever disappears yeah thanks john you're here

Okay, so the next couple of items, I think I mentioned there's less kind of meat on the bones here, in part because these interests are being met through other things that we've talked about. So there's this interest in incentives for sustainability, resiliency, and energy efficient building design. And that's kind of an easy thing to kind of check off the list. The proposed LUMO is going to include these sorts of incentives. One thing I'll just mention on that is that we're focusing the incentives on non-residential development. Because for residential development, we already have such a clear thing that we're trying to incent them to do, which is affordable housing. And so we're really trying to put a lot of the eggs in the affordable housing basket when it comes to residential development. But for commercial development, there is, I think, more opportunity to incent certain things. And so that's where we're really kind of focusing our attention. So it'll be a standard density bonus, increases in floor area ratio, kind of commensurate increases in how much development is allowed by right, kind of the standard playbook to push those things forward. We're also proposing to, really make sure that we're limiting barriers to things like district solar or district heating and cooling. You know, very energy efficient measures that might not fit within kind of our typical rules around how you can build across property lines or things of that sort. So really looking to make some headway here knowing that the building code will slowly move in a direction of requiring more efficient design. Liz.

Building on John's last comment, I just want to point out there's a lot of literature on affordable housing that if you ignore Resilience standards, if you make them very inefficient, you're actually hurting the residents down, particularly as time goes on. It's more expensive if they don't get the energy efficient appliances, et cetera. And it might look cheaper to the developer, but it's not to the residents. And it's also if you're ignoring resilience standards, flood resilience standards, It's potentially obviously very costly.

No, absolutely. And I followed those debates closely and it comes up essentially anytime there's a proposed update to the energy efficiency codes or they're housed within the building code. There's this continuous debate about what impact that's having on housing affordability. So yeah, it's definitely something dynamic we're aware of. So thank you for highlighting it. Any other questions on energy efficiency? We're almost there. I think we can wrap up before 10. So thank you guys very much for sticking with me. I think this was a issue I highlighted earlier that we're in a place where We know we have an interest in resilience strategies for areas with higher climate vulnerability. And we're looking for opportunities for our generally applicable standards to have both meaningful impacts across the board and in areas with higher climate vulnerability. So things like our canopy standards, our street tree requirements, these are all, again, generally applicable, but we know we'll have meaningful impacts in areas with higher climate vulnerability. Um, as we have the resources to get more meaningful data, um, kind of on our, uh, uh, on our radar, I think we can, we can look to, uh, make this more strategic, um, things like, uh, better stormwater mapping or like flood flood mapping, um, is, is very much, I think on our wishlist to, to get under works or underway in the next few years. And I'll just briefly touch on the last bit, and we can kind of consolidate comments on five and six. The final question was around this notion of protecting land that's important for conservation, stormwater infiltration, and things like greenways. What it really boils down to is that we have an incredibly strong tool in place already, which is our RCD. If you look at the natural features model, look at that underlying data, the matchup between our streams and our habitat corridors is so clear. There are some streams that are not habitat corridors, but there are very few habitat corridors that are not associated with streams. And where we tend to find other more meaningful land in town. This is not at all an all-encompassing statement, but it tends to already be owned by the university or the town or AWASA, some other kind of public entity. Or it tends to be in the ETJ, right? Land that's already very... that is not very conducive to new development. So I think an important point here is that we have some really strong tools in place already, and we always have kind of our zoning authority to not upzone the ETJ, right? If we know that that is a meaningful environmental part of town, that we either not upzone it or if there are opportunities or demands to up zone, that that's done in a very cautious and environmentally considerate way. And so with that, I am done with this deck. Thank you guys so much for the really solid conversation throughout. Happy to take any final comments or questions on, any of the previous 40 or 45 slides. If there's anything left to discuss, happy to do that.

Any last comments? Okay, Liz.

It's late, so I will try to keep this short. First of all, thank you, Taz. Much of what you said is not a surprise because you've been, I know, working on all this and sharing it with us all along. I look forward to seeing this. I'm sure I'll have lots of small comments when I see the details, but I think a lot of what you're trying to do on a regulatory basis I get, and I think it's pretty clear the main focus is housing supply first and foremost. I think what's missing and from the planning commission and us focus on policy is what you, the discussion we had about necessary but not sufficient. And I worry that if all we do for the next year is focus on this without those other tools, many of which are not regulatory, can't actually be put in. But if they don't happen at the same time, we could actually... I don't think that besides generating more housing, most of the other goals that have been laid out, the LUMO is sufficient to achieve them. And Because of that, if we don't, at the same time, understand and point out what else needs to do, the small area plans we've talked about, focusing on are there places where we actually have to buy land or set aside land that's already public, do the mapping, do the conservation overlay, There's a whole series of things that need to happen at the same time, and I just hope that that will be part of the discussion as well, not just the LUMO in a vacuum, if we truly want those five goals.

I would echo that. I think There's a real risk going forward in the next few years that we devote a lot of energy as we already have to what's mainly a deregulatory effort. I see the Lumos mainly deregulatory and I think the land use map amendments are going to be the same. And I think the revamp of the comprehensive plan is mostly going to do that because the the complete community objectives that that are not simply like increased housing supply are they're harder to do and the regulatory tools are really suited to it and so you need to do more sort of proactive stuff that would be in the traditionally put in the bucket of like economic development as opposed to um planning um depending on how you organize the departments and some of it requires you know money to be spent and it's um basically impossible to do a lot of this stuff at a town-wide level. It's just so dependent on idiosyncrasies or what exists currently and what possibilities exist, what land is available in individual neighborhoods. That's why I think small area planning has come up a couple of times and just wanted to flag. It doesn't really influence my view of these changes to the LUMO. I think by and large, this stuff is necessary and appropriate in my view and it's appropriate that we deregulate a lot of this stuff but that doesn't mean we should take our eye off the ball of like the larger kind of community we're building here and whether I mean the crux of it for me is whether we're doing car oriented density or not and I just I don't believe I deeply do not believe that code writing at the town-wide level is the right tool to prevent that. I also wanted to say, great job, Taz. The presentation was really excellent, and I think you answered our questions really quite well, and kudos to you. I wanted to say one other thing, but I wanted to give an opportunity for others to make any last comments to Taz first. Wes?

Well, you were giving kudos. I just want to give kudos to all of you for doing this. I think it's really essential to have the planning commission look at these things, be strong. I value each of you as individuals and a group for putting in this effort. And I've appreciated sitting in for the whole time. And thank you. Jeff?

Yeah. No, thanks, Taz. This was great. It's been four hours. I would suggest that you may want to, I think your explanations were very good. I think a lot of this is ground that the council has tread multiple times. And so you just, my advice, you know, just speaking for myself might be to sort of try to get through it a little more quickly, just because I think it's, It's a lot of material. And it's also, you know, we're also looking at this a little bit in a vacuum because there's no document that people, aside from the memo, which was very good, you know, we're talking about... 300, 400 page document that you've seen, but that we haven't seen. And so I think without that context, it's just a lot. So that's my only advice, but I think this is, I'm really excited for this. I had a few questions about some of the things that were mentioned, some of the things that weren't mentioned, but a lot of that is because the rest of it I agree with. Obviously, there's more that needs to be done outside of the code. I think that Alan and the taxpayers need to get used to spending Mike Rispoli, Public you know the entire public's money to help address some of the issues like we are doing it with greenways to address stormwater and not trying to get individual developments to chip in which helps raise the cost of new development. Mike Rispoli, So so i'm really in favor of the approach that you're taking and I look forward to diving in.

Mike.

Thanks, John. Taz, I can tell you that it's pretty obvious you have put a ton of effort into this, but I wanted to thank you for this onboarding session. It was a great help to me.

Thanks, Mike. So I want to bring this back to the one other thing we need to decide, which is how is this discussion, if at all, being conveyed to council members who weren't listening to it? Do we want to put something together? I think that would be quite difficult in one day, given that it's just too big of a discussion for me to, and I don't have the time to draft a huge memo about this, watch the tape or anything like that. I wonder, Taz and Sneha, if you have any ideas about how to leverage this discussion for the benefit of the council tomorrow night.

Yeah, I mean, I think that there are some key points that were made that, again, I'm hesitant to try to suggest to you all what the most key points were out of your discussion. I think that's really got to come from you all. I will say, I think one of the goals of... OF THE DISCUSSION TONIGHT AND WITH COUNCIL TOMORROW IS TO SET THE STAGE. THERE IS A LOT OF OPPORTUNITY TO CONTINUE THE DISCOURSE BETWEEN PLAN AND COMMISSION AND COUNCIL AS BODIES AND AS INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS. So I think if there are some key points, and I know it would be a very quick turnaround on y'all's front, but if there are key points that y'all want to kind of agree to share with council, we can definitely make sure that that gets in front of them before tomorrow's meeting. But again, I would hesitate to suggest like what those points should be.

Yeah, I get it. Jeff, let me know what you think and others, but I think it's too late in the night for us to try to do that now. I personally don't have the bandwidth to do it tomorrow. So my default approach is I'm really happy that we had three council, actually at one point we had at least four council members listening into our meeting. And that's a pretty direct channel to get ideas that we've discussed tonight into the council discussion tomorrow night. And I don't really have a better mechanism, you know, realistically to than that for tomorrow night.

Um, I, sorry, sorry. Yeah.

I mean, I have, I tried to take notes of the points people were making. I can't claim that it's comprehensive. Um, and I can't claim that it is, you know, reflective of the entire conversation, but there is that, um,

So, I mean, what's the downside in our sharing what you have? I don't think we want to do a review process, but is there a downside to just circulating it?

I think Sneha. Oh, Sneha, I'm sorry.

Yeah, I forgot about that.

Yeah, I took a few notes around here and there as well. If I can... write something up by tomorrow before the meeting. I'm happy to share that. But I would appreciate what everyone else thinks.

Yeah, we try not to impose that duty on you. We try to take it on ourselves. It's not fair to ask you to do it. But Jeff, what do you think we should do with what you have?

I mean, I could share it around to commission members and you all can look at it and see if I misrepresented you. And then if folks are okay, we can just send it to the council and say, these were our thoughts. We didn't take a vote. We didn't have an opportunity to prioritize our comments, but these are some of the issues that we raised that we think council should be aware of as you consider preparing to review the Luma.

And I'll just add that's consistent with what I know you'll have done in prior instances where as long as you're kind of transparent about the nature of the comments, I think that definitely is consistent with prior practice.

It's a collection of comments from members of the commission. Some commissioners said this, one commissioner said that. We don't even need to be that specific. We're just saying that these aren't voted on views of the body. These are ideas that came up in the discussion, right? So do others think that's a good idea? Liz, Mike, Chuck? Sure. Okay, so Jeff, what if you send us something tonight or first thing tomorrow, and then we set a deadline of like, I don't know, noon or one for people to respond, whether they have any sort of issues with wording of stuff or something missing. Yeah, exactly. Because we can't send it to the council, you know, half an hour before they need it.

Can we do it on, in like a Google Docs so that Jeff doesn't have to, you don't want to have to.

Yeah. Read my mind. I'm putting it into Google. I wrote it in Word, but I'm putting it into Google Docs right now.

Can we do that consistent public meeting laws?

Sharing sharing it between between all of us on the email.

Well, that that would be problematic if it were emailed to everybody.

As a Google Doc, you can keep the reviews. You can remember all the comments.

I think if we just set a ground rule that within a Google Doc, we're not going to have a discussion and respond to other people's comments. If you have it, just treat it as stay in your lane. If you have issues, put them in there. But the purpose of the Google Doc isn't to have a planning commission discussion. It's to, in a streamlined way, convey your individual comments simply to Jeff.

Okay. So you can just say another committee member thought, and just put in whatever you've thought. Or Jeff, do you have people's names in it?

I have people's names.

Okay. So we can just put our name, Liz thought, blah, blah, blah. I'll just add it in. If Jeff didn't convey exactly what I thought, I'll just fix my comments.

Right. Yeah. I'm just saying, try not to comment on other people's comments because that turns into, I think, something a little too close to like

a discussion with everybody in the room which we're not allowed to do in that way sure okay okay i'll email this around later and i'll you know i think it meets open record laws if I'll send it around and I'll copy staff. You know, we are supposed to have a planning commission at chapel and c.gov email, which, you know, in my, I remember when I joined that it was not working and still isn't working. So we do what we can do.

Well, I mean, we had one, but the roster, we just couldn't keep the roster updated. We didn't even know who the person was who did that and they wouldn't do it. It exists, but you're going to email, uh, colleagues from five years ago.

Yeah.

Okay. So that sounds like a great plan. And I think that's it. So thanks again to Taz and Sneha. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks, Jeff, for doing the note taking.

Yeah, it's impressive that you had that attention span.

Well, you know, given it's a four-hour meeting and it's a page and a half of notes, don't be too impressed.

It's on a transcript. Thanks, everyone. And I guess we'll see you on August 18th. That's our next meeting. I mean, I don't think we're going to meet in July. So August 18th.

We'll all get together at Taz's office hours.

Let's put a form of you, please. Book a big room.

We'll notice it, Taz.

Right, right. I just shared the calendar for the fall again, just to note that Tonight's meeting was an anomaly in having you all meet just the night before a council meeting. We're really trying to build in much more space between you guys meeting and council meeting going forward. So thank you for working through the difficulties of this schedule for today and tomorrow, but hope to not repeat it in the future. understand no problem yeah and please please use office hours i am i'm happy to chat um over the next uh six or so weeks whatever whatever is helpful thanks everyone good night thank you everyone have a good summer everyone you too