Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening, and welcome to the August 18, 2026 meeting of the Chapel Planning Commission. Planning Commission is a citizen advisory board that gives advice, doesn't make decisions, but gives advice to the town council on matters of orderly growth and development. And we have a short in quantity, but large in duration, perhaps. A giant item tonight is very significant for the town, which a preview, explanation of revisions, massive revisions to the Land Use Management Ordinance, or the LUMO of the town of Chapel Hill. But first, we'll take care of some formalities. We'll do a roll call. Mike? I'm here. Liz?

Here.

Chuck?

Here.

and i'm john mitchell the chair i'm here jeff green could not be here with us tonight and libby thomas could not be here with us tonight we have six members missing two and uh seven seat is unfilled at the moment so four is enough for a quorum The agenda tonight has approval of the last meeting minutes, the LUMO presentation and discussion, which I discussed. I think all the members know by now that we've decided to take off item three, which is the applications discussion. So it's just items one and two. Can I get a motion?

I do want to note one thing. I think you do have the option to move it to another meeting. It will come back until the Planning Commission takes an action to formally state that they are not making a recommendation on a member. They are making a recommendation on a new member. So you can either make a recommendation tonight, not explicitly say that you are not making a recommendation, or push it to another meeting.

Okay, maybe we'll come back to that at the end. Mike, were you going to motion or Liz or Chuck to approve? Actually, just the agenda.

Yeah, motion to approve the minutes.

Okay. It sounds like everybody's fine with that agenda, so just the minutes or the agenda.

Just yes for agenda.

Okay, agenda, thumbs up.

Yep.

Minutes. We're good with the minutes too, and those are the minutes of June sixteenth. I took a look. Okay, good. So now for the real business Lumo update presentation. I assume that's Taz. Thanks for being with us test after Taz's presentation. Our plan is to turn it over for. public comment so any pub member of the public who wants a comment is welcome to do so you just step up to the mic uh three minute time limit uh would be appreciated and uh after all the public comments we'll bring it back for planning commission questions and comments take away this

yeah thank you john um my name is taz with the planning department um i'm going to provide an update on the the lumo rewrite work this meeting as i mentioned to commissioner mills earlier is kind of a change in direction and how we're hoping to proceed with upcoming meetings around the lumo in which ideally staff presentations are going to be a lot shorter and really give you all the opportunity to spend time in these public meetings on deliberation amongst yourselves, receiving public comment, asking questions of staff, really using it however you best see fit, given that we've got a handful of these opportunities for public discussion. What I wanted to do this evening is not necessarily present any new substantive material about the draft LUMO. We as a group went through, I think, a four-hour meeting before the summer recess, a pretty exhaustive discussion about the substance of the draft LUMO, what you could expect to find in it. And there haven't been any changes to the draft since it was published in the beginning of the summer. But there has been an interest, I think, in talking through or teeing up a conversation around trade-offs, some of the higher level trade-offs that are implicated by the draft LUMO. That's what this presentation is going to just briefly touch on, are some of the trade-offs associated with implementing the interests that have been identified as leading the LUMO work. Those interests were identified by town council earlier this year and again are intended to be kind of a framing device, right? A way of talking about some of the major interests underlying this work. Those interests are user friendliness, housing diversity, attainability and supply, economic development and land use, the built environment and the public realm, and then environment and resilience. We're not going to talk through all of them this evening, given that there are two Planning Commission work sessions scheduled before the official legislative process kicks off. The goal is going to be to talk through three of the key interests this evening, and then talk through the remaining two, housing, and then environment and resilience, at the following Planning Commission And so, again, what I'll do, hopefully relatively briefly, is talk through these three key interests, identify some of what staff believe are some of the associated kind of high-level tradeoffs that are associated with those interests, and then touch on the ways in which the draft LUMO is attempting to balance some of those interests. So please feel free to stop and ask questions or clarifying questions per y'all's comfort. We want to facilitate as much of a discussion as you would like this to be. So looking first at the user-friendliness interest, Council identified within each of those five core interests more specific positions tied to each of those interests. Within the user friendliness interest, there's relatively straightforward things like let's just make the LUMO itself a more usable document. But there's also a lot in there about process, right? How do we make sure that the development review processes the town has in place, the approval processes that we have in place, how are those meeting complete community goals? And I think it's those interests that implicate some of the most significant trade-offs that might be relevant to this discussion. And it's really these interests three and five that are around streamlining development applications, balancing efficiency with community benefits. The interests themselves already kind of signal underlying trade-offs. And so they're, again, very, I think, good examples of the types of trade-offs that we're trying to balance with the LUMO update. So as we talked about, as we shared in the staff memo for this meeting, this user-friendliness interest really implicates, I think, two really meaty sets of trade-offs, right? On the one hand, you've got this interest in need for predictability and consistency in our development review processes and in the town's decision making. And on the other hand, you've got this interest and need for an ability to negotiate for and get and secure community benefits. You've also got, similarly tied to our development review processes, this trade-off between public participation and more objective fact-based decision-making in our development review processes. some of the ways that we're looking to balance these various trade-offs in the new LUMO. First and foremost, when we're talking about what type of development, what scale of development needs to go to council for approval, we're taking a relatively conservative approach in increasing the amount of new development that's able to go to town council. And that really cuts at both of these interests or both of these sets of trade-offs. Development review that doesn't go through town council is following a much more kind of objective fact-based process in which public participation by its nature is not part of the process. That has obviously some benefits and some drawbacks. that again speak to some of the larger kind of high-level trade-offs implicated by our user friendliness interest. Similarly, the new LUMO is beyond just thinking about what scale of development is going to town council for approval. We're also looking to find ways to ensure that projects that aren't going to town council for approval are still to this point of community benefits, still finding ways to get community benefits, meaningful community benefits, even out of projects that aren't going to town council. So you'll see kind of sprinkled throughout the new LUMO sets of incentives that are tied to projects providing community benefits that we can't necessarily mandate out of those projects. So these incentives are going to be an opportunity for projects that are going through kind of an objective administrative decision making process to still potentially get some significant community benefits for the town. And then a final opportunity that the LUMO uses to kind of address some of these trade-offs is to make sure that we take basic complete community principles and really integrate them into core LUMO standards wherever possible. Obviously there are certain elements of the complete community strategy that we can't necessarily mandate, but there are certainly elements of the complete community strategy like mixed-use development, like being mindful about where density is located, that can be baked into just the core of Lumo itself. And so wherever possible, Lumo is trying to kind of address some of these trade-offs by just baking the complete community principles into the core requirements itself. The next kind of major set of interests that council identified were tied to this notion of economic development and land use. The specific interests housed under that, more general interests, were more limited, right? This notion of supporting neighborhood scale commercial uses and then aligning land use patterns with complete community principles. And I think those in turn represent their own sets of trade-offs. We've got this tension between preserving existing neighborhoods and existing land use patterns, but then also supporting new amenities, supporting new features in town that can meet those complete community goals. Similarly, we've got this tension in kind of implicit in this work of wanting to promote mixed-use development, shorter travel times, potentially less reliance on cars. compared and contrasted against this interest in separating seemingly dissimilar land uses. Again, those two things are kind of in tension with each other. And so some of the ways in which the new LUMO addresses or attempts to address these trade-offs are when it comes to mixed-use development, bringing new amenities closer to existing residential development. The new Lumo is pretty, again, conservative in what it allows. It allows small scale commercial development in existing residential districts with an eye towards allowing some of these new uses in areas where they historically haven't been allowed, but limiting the scale and potentially, as a result, the impact of those new projects. The new Lumo also creates a new kind of medium density residential district that won't be immediately mapped anywhere, right? The new Lumo, by creating this new district, doesn't allocate that new density or impose those new rules anywhere in town right off the bat. But it basically puts something in our toolbox for use in the future, right? If Planning Commission and Council identify areas with staff input that would make sense for kind of a new missing middle oriented district to be used on the map, the draft LUMO makes that available in a way that it currently isn't available to be used around town. We're also allowing, again, with this notion of balancing the need to preserve existing neighborhoods or an interest in preserving existing neighborhoods while also bringing in new amenities to town, we're allowing, or the draft LUMO would allow kind of incrementally more dense residential development in existing neighborhoods that currently only support lower density development with an eye towards allowing some amount of change but not subjecting existing neighborhoods to kind of radical change. And then finally, and this has been touched on, I think, a little bit earlier, but another kind of feature of the LUMO that attempts to kind of balance these trade-offs is this notion of increasing what we call buy-right development opportunities. kind of most significantly in areas where we essentially already expect there to be dense development. When we talk about expanded by-right development opportunities in the new LUMO, they're really limited to the multifamily districts, the commercial districts, right? Districts that are largely only used along major transportation corridors in town, And very much as we're setting ourselves up for adoption of a new zoning map in the future, we know we have these kind of guiding principles from the future land use map and from complete community that point to where this sort of dense development would be most appropriate. And it's really only in those areas that the new LUMO is looking to make significant changes, or at least the most significant changes. in by-right development opportunities. And then finally, the third interest I wanted to speak to this evening is this notion of the built environment and the public realm, which, again, like the other interests the council identified, is associated with several kind of sub-interests, of which I think the two that really implicate one very significant trade-off this notion of you know really anything where we're looking at new infrastructure being kind of the responsibility of new development and then also opportunities for us to regulate building form site design things of that sort with an eye towards. How can those private developments provide some sort of public benefit? And that's really kind of the the key trade-off that that these interests implicate right is this notion of what is the private development potential of a particular piece of property and what are the public benefits that that development could provide whether again whether it's in the form of the development itself right if if the development is something that the town needs that development in and of itself may be a public benefit Or it may be additional infrastructure, a greenway, a common amenity, something that very expressly and explicitly serves the public. Or it could be something as potentially pedestrian as some site design or building design features that help the development contribute to the public realm. And so some of the ways, again, that the new LUMO is intended to meet this trade-off or balance these potentially competing interests of private development potential versus public benefits. And we've already mentioned incentives. The new LUMO really looks to incentivize developments that provide public infrastructure, whether that's greenways or kind of pseudo public amenities like communal outdoor spaces. Again, we look at the lawn on Weaver Street in Carrboro is kind of the prime example of a pseudo public space. The new LUMO also looks to promote development patterns that enable car-free living. We've talked extensively about this notion of what's the most effective and lasting way of breaking a dependence on cars. One of the best ways to do that is to make it as easy as possible for folks to live without a car, and that's a goal of the new LUMO. We're also looking to make sure that when and where the new LUMO introduces building and site design regulations, we're really trying to make sure that those regulations are primarily focused on functional benefits rather than purely aesthetic issues. Again, trying to make that trade off of not wanting to overly limit the private development potential of a site, but also understand that there are meaningful ways in which a site can be developed and designed that do contribute to the public realm and provide that public benefit. And then one thing that we're not significantly backing away from is this notion that new development at a certain point is gonna need to provide certain levels of infrastructure to contribute to roadway improvements, sidewalks, things of that sort. And that's something that is staying relatively stable in the new LUMO, albeit with some additional kind of capacity to link those requirements to our comprehensive plan to make sure that we're not just painting with a broad brush when it comes to what sorts of investments or infrastructure we're asking new development to provide. So again, that's just kind of in the goal of having a much shorter presentation than the last time I spoke to you all. That's kind of a high-level overview of three of Council's core interests surrounding the new LUMO, some of the trade-offs that those implicate, and some of the ways in which the draft LUMO is intended to address those trade-offs. I'd invite you all to ask as many questions about the specific trade-offs as you're interested in. But then also, I'm here for as long as you need me, so if there are other issues that we didn't even touch in this presentation that you want to talk about, ask questions about, I'm kind of at your service for the evening. Thank you.

Thanks, Taz. Appreciate it. So now we're going to go to public comment to the extent anybody in the room has anything they want to say, we welcome that. You can just step up to the lectern, and if you could keep it to three minutes apiece, that would be great.

Hi. First, I wanted to say I really appreciated the effort that was put into making the LUMO easy to use and easy to access for community members to read it. I also really appreciated the level of effort that went into the environmental protection section, particularly the stormwater management section. There was just one piece of verbiage that was a little bit alarming to us, which was that there was Basically, it exempted conveyances that are already considered to be failing to provide safe passage. So at my house, we have a culvert in our backyard, and it fails in the sense that it overtops during large storms and hurricanes. For example, during Chantal, it overtopped. Succeeds in the sense that it does not flood our house and so it was a little bit alarming to me that this verbiage was suggesting that if Developers in their analysis just showed that all the stormwater was going into our culverts they would You basically be allowed to develop whatever they wanted and potentially cause flooding issues for our home and also the surrounding other surrounding homes around that culvert. So I guess my request is that before this. ordinances is passed that be revised so that um failed conveyances at least developers need to show that they're not increasing the stormwater runoff rates and overall volume that they that they show that they're not increasing that burden that way we will not be increasing the burden on community members that are already shouldering the most burden in the community. So that's my request but please correct me if I was wrong about anything. Thank you.

Good evening. Kimberly Sanchez, CEO of Community Home Trust. So I know you didn't get the housing part today, but I'm going to just kind of be around for the next few months while we talk about this LUMO, since it does remove mandatory inclusionary zoning, is the proposal from the town. It completely removes the ordinance of the mandatoriness of it. That is one of the ways, obviously the biggest way, that Community Home Trust obtains its inventory. We are a community land trust, so any inventory that comes to us stays in our land trust, and it is permanently affordable housing. The impact of this ordinance has been that currently Community Home Trust has 300 homes in its inventory. And I appreciate the trade-offs conversation today, because I do really want this group to ask some hard questions about what those trade-offs could be and why. This is now something that we have a couple of concerns. Something mandatory, if you take it away, it's hard to bring it back. It's probably impossible. The reason why mandatory is really helpful right now is that this is not something that developers typically want to do. The LUMO, the proposed draft LUMO, gives a bunch of, City Council Chambers, incentives to developers to develop their own to develop affordable housing we're not convinced that that trade off is going to create the impact, the type and the amount of affordable housing that you see with the mandatory inclusionary zoning ordinance. Developers know when they come in here what they have to do to make sure that they have affordable housing inside of their project because of the ordinance, because it's very specific and it tells you that you have to do it. If we give them the opportunity not to do that, we can see what happens by just looking at Carrboro. Carrboro has a voluntary inclusionary housing ordinance. CHT has 50 homes there, and here we have a little over 250 in Chapel Hill. So there is actual evidence out there, even just locally. CHT will kind of continue to be a part of, the conversation and we will give you more information and we'll provide additional stuff but I just want to make that clear up front right now as we're starting to talk about this that that's on the table and it's really something that we would hope that you all would be asking some hard questions about because the impact to this community could be significant thank you

Hi there. I think my topic kind of goes to what the previous two speakers just said, which is kind of throughout the document, kind of related to the buy-write development along with other things, it's kind of a thread of essentially de-oversight of some of the construction that might be happening. Basically alluring to if it's in a certain amount of square footage that developers will have an objective process administratively that they can just go straight through and not really have any public oversight. I'm very wary of things like that that just don't have public oversight. You know, it's one thing to have a huge project and that really needs to have eyes on ability for people to talk about. And I think everyone's kind of on the same page as that. But just as impactful as a large development is the additive nature of a lot of small developments all adding up. So whether you're talking about stormwater or you're talking about housing, that if there's an abundance of developments that all spring up all of a sudden because they're able to do all this development, because it doesn't need the oversight of public opinion, that we're going to end up with an even larger amount of space that is taken up. then one large development that does good oversight. So the public's ability to come in and say, hey, this affects us in XYZ way, I'm just concerned about the public's ability to make comments on that if we just let things go process-wise for the sake of efficiency. That's all. Thank you.

Good evening. My name is David Schanzer. I'm a homeowner near Eastwood Lake, and I serve on the Lake Forest Association Board, but I'm speaking in my own personal capacity today. Our big interest of people who live near the lake is that, and this lake, basically the watershed, all the development on Weaver Dairy, all the development up on MLK and around Estes, that is all part of our watershed. and what we have seen over recent years is a increased volume of water and of course erosion and therefore silt coming into our lake this lake was dredged in 2001 at a cost of well over a million dollars that dredge was hooked to last 30 or 40 years but the lake is already filling up and it's a belief of many residences that that's because of increased development and increased erosion and silt flowing down through the watershed into the lake. So in that regard, the reforms in 7.4 of the LUMO, which talk about downstream impact development, are definitely welcome. I think that's a very important point. process to have this idea that developers have to predict what the downstream impacts, because we're a downstream entity. But what I've noticed in the draft is that there are big exemptions to developers from having to do this downstream impact analysis. And indeed, the exemptions are framed such that even if an equal amount of land is disturbed, if its purpose is for housing, it's exempted. But if its purpose is for commercial development, it has to undergo these downstream impact analyses. Now, if you're the downstream investor, a property owner or a tenant, it doesn't matter if the water that is putting silt in your lake or causing the flooding, it doesn't matter if the water landed initially on a commercial development or it landed on a housing development, the impacts of the downstream are the same. So it would seem to me to make sense that if the analyses are required for a certain size of commercial development, that those same sorts of requirements ought to be imposed if the purpose is to build housing, if it's the same size. I know there's lots of technicalities in that regard. But I hope you'll take a close look at those issues as the process goes forward. Thank you. Thank you.

Hi, Barbara Driscoll, Chapel Hill. My concerns, and I hadn't planned on making comments, but I felt like it was maybe a good opportunity to have a few comments made. Overall, I think that the new LUMO is better than the previous LUMO. Development ordinance, but it's not what's going to meet our current demands for stormwater controls nor in Make the city resilient in the future for what is to come The density is on material roads is of concern Especially since there's not any provisions for offsetting this density with more green space And I think some of the previous ways to allow Parks and Rec or give them funds has been exempted in the current LUMO. In addition, there aren't any requirements on lots of a certain site to have any sort of stormwater controls. And that's a big concern, as well as the canopy retention percentages are low, 10% to 20%. I'm feeling that some lots are excluded depending on the size from having any kind of tree retention. So the combined impact of having this more dense growth is going to be that we have less resilience as far as the climate crisis as well as biodiversity because we have less tree canopy. Thank you.

Thank you. Looks like that may be it. Please.

Hi. I became aware that the city of Raleigh has a pre-development baseline based on 100% forested trees, whether the lot for development has trees or not. And that is a way to, number one, cut down on your paperwork. Number two, give us resiliency, prevent downstream flooding, and I think you would find that you could reallocate some of your staff to inspections rather than going through paperwork because that cuts down a lot of paperwork. I sent an email. I don't know if you got it, but anyway, there's an email about it, and the city of Raleigh is an example that we could follow. Thank you.

Sir, the email, where did you send it?

I sent it to planning.

Okay.

And also to the mayor and council.

Okay, maybe we could dig it out of the council archive.

Isn't that at 520? Yes, today.

Okay. We'll take a look. Thank you. Taz, before we take it back to the Planning Commission, I just wanted to give you an optional opportunity to respond to anything that you'd like to, but there's no need. It's up to you.

It's not so difficult for staff to respond directly to the public comment. I think if there are any questions that were raised by members of the public they are interested in getting more information about how we answer your questions.

Sure, sure. We can pick up on themes. Yeah.

Taz, if you can speak in the mic, please.

It's not typical for staff to respond to public comment directly during these meetings. But if there's anything that you all are interested in us responding to, happy to do that.

Understood. Thank you.

So let me bring it back to the Planning Commission. comments and questions are fair game and you can pick up on public comments if you'd like or you can and or you can raise your own you know questions and comments but this is the discussion section mike go ahead yeah can i start in in the first of all i think the lumo is definitely an

upgrade to existing LUMO and all the balances and trade-offs are rational and they make sense, but often things are not quantified. When you go through it, and I'll be more specific in an email to you, things like larger project or this versus that, to me it's a large project has to be identified as what is a larger project. There may be a baseline somewhere that I haven't got that far. But I just wanted to know, how do you define some of those as referred to larger project, or this versus that?

Yeah, thanks Mike. I think what you might be referring to, I think in the reference guide document, the 40 page accompanying document, we mentioned in a couple of places that larger projects will be subject to certain requirements. I think one place that I can think off the top of my head is around preservation of existing tree canopy. I think that's something where we use that phrase, like larger projects will be subject to a tree canopy requirement. All of that is quantified in the ordinance itself. I think we were just trying to strike the right balance between the level of detail we provided in that overview document versus the ordinance itself. So in that particular example, I think with the tree canopy requirements, um what we in the ordinance kind of quantify as a larger project is an acre or more so uh for tree protection uh or preservation of existing tree canopy um that requirement would kick in for developments uh of an acre or larger okay appreciate that yeah absolutely um john would be helpful if i hung out up here like if you have

it would probably save you the exercise.

Sounds good.

Go ahead, Liz.

Thanks, Taz. I'm going to say a few comments about the broad trade-offs. And then I think I've got a lot of comments. I won't necessarily do them all, since we'll have another chance. But I'm going to pick up a lot of what we heard was about flooding and trees. So I'm going to pick up on some of those. I think the two categories you left for the other meeting are the two categories where you're going to get the most public comments. So it's not surprising that they didn't necessarily follow exactly with what you said. But on this user, both the trade-offs and then also that first category of user friendliness, I think... The LUMO does a very good job of simplifying, streamlining. It's clear that there is a lot of essentially removing. I can't remember what this gentleman called it, but not deregulation. And I think there was a broad sense that there was too much, and there were too many hurdles, and it made it hard. But also, you have to be very careful, obviously, what you pull back and what you don't. And I think there are examples where there was a hope for easy, uniform, simple standards in places where the proxies that were used for making decisions just don't align with what the town is trying to achieve. And I think one of the things that we already heard from the audience, and I have a feeling you're going to hear a lot about, because I keep hearing, is this idea of collector and arterial streets, which would greatly simplify this understanding of how we're going to get multi-use and density in certain areas. And that would be great if, in fact, these collector streets and arterial streets mimicked where it is that we want to develop but it's very clear just from what I've been hearing from lots of people that it's pretty easy to find places where that's not the case and so we've actually seemed to be making trouble for herself picking Essentially sticking to simple standards to simplify when they're not giving us the answers It's yeah, it might be faster and easier, but it's not going to give us Anything that aligns with the complete community our town comprehensive plan another example is stormwater And that's what I want to go through a bunch of questions on that but one other point and this is about the ease of use and And I think these next few months we've been asking for a while for more graphics. And I noticed like in some of the comments on the Lumo, you know, if you go in and I've put in a few comments in there, people, ease of understanding what this Lumo really needs visuals like, show us a map of the collector streets and the arterial streets and what it might look like, you know, with this density, what it might, give us a map of, stormwater, where would we expect to see land disturbance, et cetera, et cetera. I think people visually want to see what the impact of some of these changes are, not just, well, the first thing would be good is a few more tables, but visuals would help because without them, people... You're hearing stories of things which I know are not even true, or maybe they could in some crazy world. I mean, technically they could happen, but you know because of economics that certain things won't happen. But if you don't get out there and actually show people what this is, can do and is likely to do, then people are going to make up their own stories. And so that's my big picture. Now, I have some specific. I was going to start with stormwater and follow on some of the comments that we heard. Would that be appropriate unless you have any? OK. So now I'm going to get down to some more technical. Questions, but I'd say my overarching questions related to Stormwater is that this is very individual by individual but we know that flooding issues are cumulative and that So a lot of what we want in a resilient, what our town says in our comprehensive plan, a resilient Chapel Hill is very hard to do. And I'm curious what the Luma could do to help with that. And I'll get to that. But on the impervious requirements, my first question is, this would be a great place where I would like to see. So the town essentially has three types of impervious requirements. There's the RCD, which is a couple different things, but around, I think, 6% impervious is allowed. And then there's this WPD, the Watershed Protection District, which has a whole series of different impervious requirements. And then there's everything else. And everything else, essentially, it's either 50% or 70%. And that's pretty much across the board. And you can see what's 50%, what's 70%. But it doesn't, the degree of vulnerability to flooding or the role as the infiltration area or the effect on downstream, none of that seems to affect the impervious. And so I guess the first question is, why 50-70?

Yeah, so you're totally correct that I think those three buckets, right, RCD, water supply, watershed, protection district, and then everything else are kind of our three main buckets of regulating impervious surface. And the everything else bucket is kind of this 50% and 70%. Those are our existing standards. In today's LUMO, it's 50% for kind of smaller scale residential development, 70% for anything that's commercial development or multifamily residential. And we're essentially, again, we're keeping those the same because we are not looking to further constrict, again, that trade-off between restricting private development potential versus public benefit. We're not looking to further constrict private development potential to the extent possible. There are some other meaningful environmental regulations that are going to place additional constraints on development potential, but we didn't see a further restriction in impervious surface as one of those. I will also say, and this is just something that we are generally having to take a light touch as a result of, are the state limitations on down zoning, which basically every community in the state that is touching their development ordinance in any way, shape, or form is just having to be very delicate in provisions or amendments to the rules that ratchet down development intensity. So just something that we're kind of needing to take a conservative approach towards.

Yeah, so on the 160D down zoning issue, I get that, and certainly our town attorney should be reviewing all of this, and we have to be careful we're not asking for trouble, but a lot of this is not. A lot of this is allowed under 160D, and it's also possible that as early as this next election cycle, there will be changes to that, whereas once we... We seem to get a LUMO. We hold onto it for a very long time. So it seems like we should really think very hard about what those levels are. a lot in the rural transition, the RT, RD or RT zone with, let's see, over 100,000 square feet, which is 2.3 acres or larger. You can, without any, you could just by right have half of that over an acre just paved over. or built upon. I mean, that's quite big. It may be fine. It may be in a zone where that really has very little impact. But it could be in a very vulnerable area. So I guess my next question is, do you see any mechanism for geographically targeted stormwater standards that would take those critical areas and be able to give a different level of, say, impervious, such as an overlay, a watershed resilience overlay?

Yeah, there's definitely mechanisms, and it's definitely possible. It would take time and resources. It's nothing that isn't knowable. We just don't have the data literally in our hands at this moment. So it would definitely take additional analysis to be able to understand Where are those high vulnerability areas? What are the kind of appropriate mitigation measures to put into place? So it's doable, but it will take time and resources.

yes um but it's important so i'm not asking if you're ready to zone an area in such which you would need the data for i'm asking could we say develop a watershed resilience district and describe how the different categories but leave it for When we have those analyses, I think we're very close to that. Actually, for the Booker Creek watershed, we've put an enormous amount of effort into all the sub-watershed. We probably, if we had such a district, we probably wouldn't take that much to be able, and that, of course, is probably the most significant for the flooding problems we've had. So I'm not asking about... zoning, I'm asking about putting such a, as you said, I think with something else, put that tool in our toolkit now so that we can use it while we're forming the LUMO. Could we do that?

yeah i mean again um there i'm not going to say we we can't write a new zone into the our new overlay zoning district into the luma that doesn't exist in the draft right now again time and resources is is a major constraint there i will also just say the the feasibility of um kind of targeted overlay districts that I think by design would need to limit development potential is, again, another thing that we're just going to be very mindful of is something like that actually something that we, even if we put it in our toolbox, are we going to have the legal ability to deploy it in the future?

I mean, I get the down zoning issue and would obviously need to be very mindful of that. We do, for the watershed protection, we do have very complex, and we're able to do it for that, but that's really all about drinking water, not about... So it's something that we're used to doing, and we have the capabilities, obviously, because we have a very sophisticated system for that. Okay, I'll keep moving on. I'm curious, going back, talking about the WPD, these watershed protection districts, watershed protection districts, the current LUMO mentions Jordan watershed, and the proposed LUMO also puts in University Lake. But it doesn't explain why, and I don't, can you give the significance of that?

Yeah, so the water supply watershed program is a set of state regulations that we implement and a lot of local jurisdictions implement through their zoning code. Historically, Chapel Hill, as you mentioned, Liz, has only recognized the water supply watershed related to Jordan Lake. Because the state regulations kind of delineated those watersheds at a pretty rudimentary level. But those state regulations also said that if additional kind of analysis is done, typically through the form of surveys that specifically identify ridgelines that can kind of pinpoint the spot at which literally a drop of water on one side of this line is generally going to flow towards one water body or another, if those surveys, if that analysis is done, that the boundaries of the water supply watershed districts can be amended to accurately reflect what's actually on the ground, like where the actual physical distinction between those watersheds lies. And so there's been some discussion that a portion of Chapel Hill's jurisdiction in essentially our southern extraterritorial jurisdiction along Smith Level Road, There's been some discussion that some property in that area is likely to be in the University Lake water supply watershed. And so we've got to have those rules that are ready to implement so that if and when the maps are adjusted, that there are rules in place on our books that would apply based on the updated mapping.

So that's interesting. So that's state required. But then the state 160D says you can't down zone. What if that results in some down zoning?

That is a excellent legal question of the state potentially putting us between a rock and a hard place of its own creation that we're just going to have to wrangle with.

And 160D does say overlays are allowed. So it's not that you can't have overlays. I mean, that's.

Exactly. And the key distinction here is that the state is potentially putting us between mandates of its own making. So that's just something we're going to have to figure out.

Do you have a map or even an early map of what the impact of this might be?

of the University Lake water supply. I believe there's some early mapping that's been produced. It's preliminary to my understanding. But again, it's kind of a relatively thin sliver of property on the east side of Smith Level Road with maybe a little bit kind of flirting with 15501 down in the southern ETJ area.

Why don't we go to some other questions?

Go to some other and come back. Why don't we just keep moving it around? Okay. We'll come back here. Chuck, did you have anything?

Nothing grand.

Okay. All right. Well, let me know if you want to chime in. All right. TAS, I wanted to thank you for meeting with me. I think it was about a week ago. You're generous with your time. I'm not going to repeat everything we discussed. It was very helpful to me. I want to pick up on some questions that occurred to me based on public comments tonight to get to the bottom of what's going on and make sure I'm understanding. So the first, there was a comment about failed conveyances, so I think this is water conveyance, riparian conveyances, like a culvert that's already failing, that's overtopping in certain storm conditions. Does the LUMO, the draft LUMO, provide some kind of lower requirement with respect to downstream analysis for new development such that if a conveyance is already failing, there's no responsibility for not making it worse. I'm just wondering what this is all about.

Yeah, it's a really good point that was brought up earlier. So the general kind of landscape here is that LUMO's baseline stormwater management requirements is kind of a do-no-harm approach, that for development subject to these rules, the post-development condition can't be worse than the pre-development condition. At baseline, that's better than some neighboring communities that allow some kind of wiggle room that might say, oh, your post-development outfalls or outflows can be 10% higher than your pre-development. So we're already starting from kind of a position of power there with those rules. That kind of do no harm approach typically means that there isn't really a risk of making downstream conditions worse, just at baseline. But there are circumstances in which kind of the regrading of a site, converting what historically would have been more diffuse flow off of a property and channeling that towards one portion of a property could have some downstream impacts. The draft LUMO includes a new set of requirements for a downstream impact analysis for certain types of development. The standard to which that downstream impact analysis is held is that you've got to prove, quote unquote, safe passage on downstream conveyances. The exemption is for conveyances that in the pre-development condition don't already meet that standard. So there's kind of two things here. I think that exemption, that a pre-development conveyance that already is failing, there's that plus this kind of general do no harm principle. I think the way we thought about it initially was that the two of those combined was strong enough. but if there's this concern right I think it's a valid concern about what about making sure kind of a belt and suspenders approach right because I think already this notion of the do no harm plus the downstream impact analysis is a little bit of a belt and suspenders approach but I think we can strengthen that um for this concern of downstream conveyances that are already failing pre-development just kind of double down on that notion that you can't make a failing conveyance worse that piece there of you can't make a pre-development failing conveyance worse is not explicitly in the draft

um so i think it's a it's a valid point and certainly something that we could look into uh uh improving so i i noticed that same thing and i think i even put a little comment on your public comment thing and just to add you could imagine a failing culvert that just overtops a little and if there's really, if you don't say you can't make it worse, you could do horrible things and essentially a free pass even if it's just slightly out of, so really should be, you don't have to fix the problem but you can't make it worse.

Yeah, I agree. I think it's a good thing for us to look into and we can certainly make sure that we take a hard look at it.

So I want to stay on this downstream. What about the question of why would you have downstream analyses for commercial but not for the same size residential?

Yeah, I was double checking to see where that kicks in. The tipping point for downstream analysis right now is that, by and large, any residential development with four or fewer units would not be required to do a downstream impact analysis. If you are kicked into multi-family developments of more than four units, that's the point where commercial versus residential is treated the exact same. So the only time when commercial and residential is treated differently is if the residential component is four or fewer units. The thinking there is that with, again, Story of our lives basically is that there's trade-offs. There's competing goals One of the things that's implicit in complete community, and I think we've been grappling with this for a long time as a community is How do we? allow incremental residential density and so we wanted to be mindful about not Kind of stacking too many additional and new standards onto residential development, particularly small scale residential development, because it's meeting other important town goals. So that's where that kind of idea of there is a scale of residential development that's treated differently than commercial, but it's at four or fewer.

But I mean, there's an example where we're going for simplicity and streamlining at the cost of potentially, you could have very large two unit or a huge home with huge disturbance and it's essentially, you know, it's up to them. They still have to deal with the non-erosive and diffusion, although there's issues of that. Part also, you have different... Sorry, Mike. Oh, pardon me. I won't... Okay, I won't go in...

Okay. But that...

That's another, I think, argument for why geographically spatial watershed resilience units that identifies those places where really you just can't afford to have, you know, 100,000 square feet of land disturbance and doing nothing about it if you identified those then I'm sorry a single Landowner shouldn't be able to do that without having to address the impact yeah, and it's just too important to say well we don't want them to have to be bothered because they have to do all these other things and

Yeah. And one thing I'll just clarify, the exemption for stormwater management, you mentioned the non-erosive and diffuse flow requirement. That is the current treatment for single family homes that have, single family and two family homes that have less than 20,000 square feet of land disturbance. For single-family homes, we're actually bringing that threshold down to, or the draft LUMO is proposing to bring that threshold down to 12,000 square feet of land disturbance. So an individual single-family home would be subject to stormwater management requirements beyond the non-erosive and diffuse flow requirements. actually be required to treat stormwater on site if they exceed 12,000 square feet of land disturbance. For two family, three family, and four family development, there's a similar threshold. It's at the Now what threshold for single family is the 20,000 square feet of land disturbance. That threshold would carry forward for two, three, and four family development. So you mentioned 100,000 square feet of land disturbance. If a four family project were coming through with 100,000 square feet of land disturbance, they would absolutely be required to treat stormwater on site.

But a single family also?

Yeah, the single family threshold is 12,000 square feet.

Right. So the complication is that there are all these different categories and different cutoffs. And sometimes they don't align. Like it tells you to go to the engineering guide to find how it is to deal. And then the engineering guide actually uses different thresholds than you. So it does get a little complicated. I have some more specific comments, which I will either send you an email or put them in, because this may be getting a little tedious. But I strongly feel that this can be addressed in a more sensible way than randomly coming up with these numbers that These thresholds, which I think are often not strong enough, but also you're exempting certain land use types, even if they're having the same impact. It's a different land use type that's having the same level of disturbance.

I also wanted to ask about... Ms. Sanchez's point about mandatory inclusionary zoning. So my understanding is the current LUMO has an inclusionary housing ordinance that applies to multifamily development, whereas the draft LUMO removes the mandatoryness of inclusionary housing as it applies to multifamily development and substitutes for it? Is this a new, or I'm not sure if this is carried over from before, but I think it's a new thing, substitutes for it inclusionary zoning standard that applies to at the subdivision stage.

So the subdivision rules, they exist today. They exist, okay.

So it's partially retaining the mandatoriness as it applies to subdivisions, but not as it applies to multifamily development?

That's correct, yeah. And even within multifamily, today's multifamily inclusionary zoning rules only apply to for sale multifamily. They don't apply to rental multifamily. And that's as a matter of state law. Right.

I remember a year or two ago, John Weiss, the chair of the CDC at the time, came to the council and said, we, the CDC, are concerned that in Blue Hill, the inclusionary zoning provisions have produced, I think, zero designated affordable units in Blue Hill.

So there's no mandatory inclusionary zoning in Blue Hill at all. It's just incentives. Not even incentives. The kind of vision of Blue Hill to begin with was that there would be a couple of sites that would be reserved for future development of affordable housing. Some of those have been built, right? The properties on Legion Road that are affordable housing. But the premise of Blue Hill was that there would be no requirement or incentives around affordable housing.

OK, my mistake. So Ms. Sanchez was saying that Community Home Trust has something like 300 units under their administration. And I'm wondering what portion of those units derived from conditional rezonings versus by right development. It was my impression, but I don't know, that almost all of them were from conditional rezonings and almost none of them by right development because economically rational developer would simply evade the by right requirement by building rentals.

yeah and um again without knowing um the the specifics of each of those 300 i don't want to speak uh specifically about those but speaking in generalities if a project went through a conditional zoning and in chapel hill conditional zoning started in about 2018 so if a project went through a conditional zoning the the kind of legal operative tool that we would say That is the the legal reason right like the but for reason that there is an affordable housing commitment on that property is the conditional zoning ordinance. The specific the site-specific conditional zoning for that property. If the property was a for sale multifamily project, the inclusionary zoning ordinance in LUMO technically does apply. But the conditional zoning, because of the additional grant of authority that we get through the conditional zoning process, it's going to be that conditional zoning that's the really lasting opportunity for us to create affordable housing commitments. And then if it's a rental multifamily, it is purely the conditional zoning that's responsible for those affordable units. OK.

So since you've been on the town staff, have there been any by-right projects, not conditional rezonings, by-right projects, multifamily owner-occupied that delivered any units at all of price-controlled units?

and I don't have, you know, encyclopedic knowledge of this, but I've been on town staff for about four years. I think the best example of for sale multifamily would be South Creek. That's conditional. Yeah. I'm talking about not conditional.

Yeah.

No, buy right multifamily for sale, not that I'm aware of. Right.

So I'm just wondering, in practice, what is the town giving up? by moving away from mandatory inclusionary zoning for non-conditional rezoning for by right multi-family i mean i can see like theoretically the town is giving up something but i i actually haven't seen it in five years or so of observing this in practice that there's anything what i do see is that um there's a strong incentive so long as we have an inclusionary zoning ordinance that only applies to owner-occupied can't apply to rentals because there would be views rent control violates state law. Unless a developer wanted to avail herself or himself of the dimensional incentives lower setbacks, higher height, whatever we're providing as a benefit for setting aside 15%, 20%, or whatever, affordable units, unless they actually want that incentive and are willing to do it voluntarily. Typically, I would think that they would just build rentals. And I wonder if that's part of the reason why Over the last 10 years, we've had such a boom of rental development as opposed to owner-occupied because we're actually, in the way that we're doing inclusionary housing, skewing the market without actually producing affordable units. So the main impact is we're skewing it toward rentals. And I would say that's not a policy. That's an unintended consequence that may be problematic unless we have a preference as a town for more rentals.

Yeah, it's certainly possible. I don't have the ability to attribute it to that, but it's certainly a possibility. I think very much the mantra as we were looking at tweaking the inclusionary zoning ordinance was to not take away meaningful tools from the town, right? Tools that have been proven to produce results for the town. And I will say that that was very much kind of a first principle as we were, you know, looking to make adjustments to the inclusionary zoning ordinance.

Liz, did you want to dig back into?

I was maybe going to, several people brought up trees. Okay, sure, go ahead. But Mike, do you have any? Nope. So trees came up and canopy, And by my reading, there were some improvements. The LUMA looks less at individual trees and looks at canopies. But there are also some places where it became less strong. I think 2 to 12 unit residential and mixed use categories have lower canopy requirements. And very small lots are completely exempt. And then there's also this opportunity to essentially allow you to have up to 25% that you can get rid of the canopy but put money in lieu, a payment in lieu for trees that you've cut down. Is that correct? Correct. So I guess my first question is, what is the payment in lieu used for?

Yeah, so a payment in lieu for tree canopy has always been, or it's part of today's LUMO. And what it can be used for is it's basically constrained by the same constraints that all payments in lieu of regulations are constrained by, which is that the payment has to be used by the town for the same general purpose as the underlying regulation that was the impetus for the payment. So a payment in lieu for tree canopy can't be used, for example, to build a swimming pool somewhere. It's got to be used for tree canopy. And it's got to be used generally to the benefit of the property that produced the payment, so generally in the vicinity of the property that produced the payment. Again, a payment in lieu offered by, we've already mentioned the South Creek development, payment in lieu offered by the South Creek development could not, or likely would not be used to pay for tree planting at public works facility on the other end of town.

So it has to be geographically?

Geographically close. And there's no hard and fast rule for how close is close enough, but close.

And then 25% can be used for alternative design, things like shade structures, green roofs, high albedo surfaces. So losing trees has ecological components. How do you decide what is an alternative, what should be equivalent to losing canopy?

Are you asking, like, how did we come up with those four?

How do you decide what's the equivalent of 25% tree cover in, say, green roof for paving a high albedo pavement? How do you figure that out?

Yeah, I think the most clear way of doing it would just be a one-to-one replacement. If you were using some alternative method to offset 500 square feet of tree canopy, we would be looking for a one-to-one replacement of some of these other mitigation measures. We readily acknowledge that that is not by any means a... Ecological equivalency? Yeah, it's not an ecological equivalency. I don't know that there is a meaningful way to... create an equivalency. I wanted to say equivocate, but that doesn't mean what it sounds like it should mean. There's no meaningful way to say, well, 500 square feet of tree canopy is the equivalent of x square feet of shade structure. I think we readily acknowledge that there is not a way to do that in a meaningful way. And so what we're proposing is rudimentary.

Yeah, it's rudimentary and is there in the new Luma and I might have missed this is there somewhere a simple like current but be nice to see current versus proposed all these different categories and what the changes are and Even better to see maps of what the implications might be but even just a table that compared them would be very helpful Yeah, I think one thing I'll just mention on that I

comparison tables for the entire ordinance are obviously yeah yeah yeah so I think if there's if there's specific asks on that front that's that's really easy to provide you know just compare existing tree canopy standards versus nutrient canopy coverage standards that's easy to do if asked for

So I saw no reference in the new LUMO to the natural features assessment and map, which you all put so much great effort into. Do you just envision this as only being informational and not a tool that can help in any sort of land use planning, such as potentially conservation overlay districts?

Yeah, we do not at all envision it as a tool that doesn't have a purpose in land use conservation planning, Liz. We've, I think, for several years now talked about what is the benefit of the natural features model and how it can or can't reasonably be incorporated into our land use planning. I think one of the things that we have identified really significant barriers to is the ability for an ordinance, generally applicable standards, to reference something more dynamic like the natural features model. Some of the concerns, and this is just a short list of concerns with referencing natural features model in something like an ordinance, is the fact that the natural features model can change in kind of the snap of a finger. The underlying data changes if Esri, one of the companies that provides data that is fed into the natural features model, If they provide an update to that underlying data, the model could change overnight. And if our ordinance references that model, we are suddenly making really significant changes potentially to land use regulations based on something that has no basis in the town's legislative decision making. So that's why we don't see, to your point, natural features model is not referenced in the ordinance because it just isn't the sort of tool that can responsibly be referenced in an ordinance of this sort. That being said, um for at least a year now when conditional zonings are coming through the town the natural features model is very much a part of our planning and our review of projects when new projects come to us it is one of the first things that we tell a developer that hey we're going to be looking at your site with the natural features model in mind and we're going to be making assessments and under helping council and planning commission understand the trade-offs associated with the site based on the natural features model and the underlying data that it represents so can a developer find this on their own or do they have to wait for you all to give them the Oh, it's all publicly accessible and available to folks.

But I don't think there are any links on our town website to the map, to the tool.

I can double check that and make sure that it's as available as it needs to be. But it is certainly available. And I know in the development community, folks understand that that is something that is going to be part of the process.

I have it in my, because I know the site. But I can't find it going through the town website.

yeah yeah well i i can commit to making sure that it's it's available um but again i again can assure you that um when projects are coming through our kind of review process uh natural features model is a key part of that yeah um i want to talk for a minute about um triplexes and quadplexes so as i understand it a little over half the town current is currently zoned

R1 or R1A, some version of R1.

It's pretty close to that, yeah.

And as of a couple years ago, three years ago, one can build a duplex for the most part in the whole town, but not a triplex or a quadplex as of today. Okay, so... um one way to step in that direction should the council want to do that is to put in some kind of simple standard automatic standard in the lumo such as what's been proposed if you're on a if the parcel fronts on or mainly accesses a arterial or a I always want to say circulators, collector, collector street or an arterial, then you could do the triplex or quadplex, certain strings attached dimensionally. Or if you're within a quarter mile of a greenway entrance, provided the greenway itself is Currently, the draft says 100, but I think it's being revised to 1,000 feet length of greenway.

OK. Yeah, the draft says 100. I think we've recognized that's way too inclusive. And so 1,000 is probably where it will land.

So just sticking with the street designation trigger for a second. Where could somebody find a list or a map of arterial? There are only three categories, as I understand this. Arterial, there's not circulator, but collector. I'm just going to write that down. This is going to happen again. And local, that's the other one, like local neighborhood street. So if somebody is wondering, oh, how does this affect me? I don't know if my street, Elliott Road, let's say. I'm just picking a random street. What is that? Where do they go to find that?

yeah so uh currently i think the best tool that's available like as of 7 29 pm uh right now um it would be the the town interactive gis map which is publicly accessible map that has a lot of information on it zoning districts A lot of information. Among the pieces of information on that map is a layer that essentially identifies every street in town, tells you whether it's a state-owned road or a town-owned road so you know who to complain to if there's something wrong. And critically, it tells you what the designation for that street is, whether it's a local, collector, or arterial. I think as we've had some really good conversations with folks in the community about the accessibility of that information. And so I think yesterday at our first LUMO open houses, was our first time debuting a much more accessible map that doesn't require you to click through different layers or anything like that. It's just a map of Town of Chapel Hill's zoning jurisdiction with arterial and collector streets highlighted.

Oh, just color-coded.

Yeah, and you can just assume that everything else is a local or I-40. That's great. Yeah, and so that map was shared publicly.

Is it on the website?

It's not yet, but it will be probably within the next couple of days. It's really just a matter of taking all those posters that we had at the open house yesterday, turning them into PDFs and putting them on the website. So the intent is very much for it to be up and available on the website very soon.

Okay. And those designations, arterial, collector, or local, were made when and for what purpose? Yeah.

So those designations are made essentially by public works department. So the designations, arterial, collector, local, are basically defining and describing the role that the particular road plays in the town's transportation network. Arterial streets are the larger roads that move people, not just through town, but even across town, right? If you're getting from Durham to Carrboro, you're just moving through Chapel Hill. Those are arterial streets. At the other end of the spectrum are local streets, which are very much like destination streets. They are where a lot of trips just end when you are driving home. Right, cul-de-sac is by definition. Yeah, cul-de-sac, when you are driving home. Yeah. you typically are going to end up on a local street. That's the other end of the spectrum. And then collectors are what help kind of get you from an arterial kind of further into a neighborhood. But for many people, the collector isn't necessarily going to be the end of that trip. So it's a classification based on the function that erode plays in the overall network. I'm not actually familiar with the last time or the last time that list was updated. It's not something that... because it's based on function in a broader network, it's not something that really is particularly dynamic. An arterial street is essentially always going to be an arterial street. A local street, again, at the other end of the spectrum, is almost always going to continue to be a local street. And similarly, collectors are typically going to, their function is going to continue to stay the same.

OK, and I imagine Public Works Uses the designations to prioritize you know upgrades to sidewalks or Okay, maybe trash pickup maybe yeah trash pick up snow plowing right solving like just street maintenance Yeah, making sure because presumably it's higher usage.

Yes, and can one street have different categories in different segments

It can, yeah. And that's a benefit to mapping rather than just lists. Because as you can imagine, the list can get a little funky if you say, well, such and such street between this intersection and another intersection is one designation. If you're on a different segment of the street, it has now turned into a different designation. So both a list and a map are valuable. I think the map is faster to convey and more likely to accurately convey in a way that is just meaningful for people, like what the designation is. But to your point, Liz, it definitely can shift.

So sticking with collector streets, what is it about the quality of being a collector street that makes that street particularly logical as a place to designate for triplexes and quadplexes?

Yeah, so a couple of things. I think first and foremost, proximity to arterial streets, right? Almost by definition, like you'll never see a collector that is particularly, that isn't in some way, shape, or form linked up to an arterial. So that proximity to arterioles is an important feature because in Chapel Hill, arterioles are where we already see a lot of density. So if you're thinking about the most logical place for new density is in somewhat close proximity to existing density. Collectors are a natural kind of offshoot of that because they are almost by definition offshoots of existing corridors of density. There's also, again, this point of what are our operational standards around collectors? We do put more resources into maintaining collectors, both in terms of capital improvements, the quality of the road itself, but then also in inclement weather, whether we're making sure that those are cleared as quickly as possible. So we're putting resources towards making sure that those are accessible routes. And then there's longer-term planning. When we're thinking about where we have intentions to focus new sidewalks, that kind of upgrade to existing infrastructure, collectors are much more likely to be an emphasis or a priority for new public investment in infrastructure way before local streets, right? It's just very difficult to make the business case for public investment in a lot of infrastructure on local streets. Got it.

Can I ask?

Yeah, go ahead. Are you still on? No, go ahead. What is the percentage of, say, mileage that make up arterial versus collector versus...

Cool. That's a really good question that I don't know the answer to, but I'm sure we could find the answer. It's definitely knowable. I just don't know it.

Well, I think it's in- Or even land area.

It's like, is this 10% of R1? Or is this 20%?

Or number of parcels that abut? Because- If arterial is 10% and collectors are 15%, I get that that's densification. But if arterials are 10% and collectors are 40%, now we're talking sprawl. And the whole idea of the complete community is to densify. So it's really what percentage are we talking about that you're trying to... I mean, it really depends on how many streets.

Yeah, I would be cautious about categorizing it as sprawl, right? Typically when we talk about sprawl, we're looking at the expansion of kind of the footprint of a jurisdiction, right? That's just something that Chapel Hill really can't do because we're kind of legally landlocked, right? Can't expand to the west because of Carrboro. Can't expand to the north because of the rural buffer. Can't expand to the south because of a combination of the rural buffer and Chatham County. And we can't really expand to the east, again, because of Durham.

I accept that I did not use the right word there. But my vision of the complete community is we want to have walkable communities, but we want to have a lot of development, tight development, and at the same time be preserving those corridors of green space and greenways that complement it. And what I don't really see in the LUMO is a coherent plan for the latter. It seems pretty fragmented where you're allowing canopy, you know, preserving canopy, and if the density is everywhere, then it's not densification, it's density everywhere. So a lot of it depends for using these collectors is what are we talking about, where are they, and what percentage is it if we're really trying to...

Absolutely, and point very well taken. I think the collectors are, again, without knowing the actual number, I would be very surprised if they approached 40% of R1 was adjacent to a collector. It also just kind of brings us back to kind of the four places in which the complete community strategy, the document that was adopted into the comp plan, it identifies four kind of general categories of areas where we want to promote more density. It says large infill sites, small infill sites, areas along transit corridors, and then areas along greenways. So it is promoting and really as a core element of complete community saying that we want more residential density. in these various areas, including near greenways and infill sites with infrastructure. So again, I think that is something we're really trying to implement through these new rules around incremental density bonuses based on road or proximity to greenways.

Just one more question on this. If one decided that arterial roads are great and some collector roads are appropriate and others not, is there any reason why you couldn't actually come up with some other classification of some subset of the collector roads?

It's possible, right? Council could adopt a list of roads that would meet certain criteria. And that's kind of within your prerogative and council's prerogative if they wanted to use a different set of criteria. I would just caution against the kind of hyper-focused and very hyper-local decision-making that that might result in, literally like a street-by-street kind of set of debates. When we think about these sorts of rules, we do want to zoom out just a little bit higher than that level of granularity. But it's definitely a possibility.

I wanted to ask briefly about the second part, which is the greenways trigger. So the draft LUMO allows triplexes, quadplexes, and RA and RB zones when, quote, located on a zoning lot, any part of which is within one quarter mile of a publicly accessible and town-maintained entrance to a paved greenway with a length of at least, let's say, 1,000 feet. Is there a definition? There is a definition of Greenway. I saw that. Is there a definition of entrance? What is a Greenway entrance?

Yes, I mean, it would need to be an access point to a Greenway. It's not defined. I think if there's a really strong interest in defining it beyond just kind of the first principle of statutory interpretation is go with the plain language meaning of the word. So if we find that the plain language meaning of an entrance that meets these other criteria, right? It's not somebody sneaking on from private property. Exactly, yeah. It's town maintained. And that's where the town maintained part of it is really a key feature there that what we're not trying to do is to say, to your point, somebody has just cleared a path through their backyard and declared this as an entrance to a greenway, we don't want that to be a trigger because that is impossible to track. It's impossible to make some clear representations of what the scope of that would be. It could also be really detrimental to our greenways. We want to have controlled access So you don't just see a bunch of Whatever your favorite term is for these desire paths goat paths Kind of informal trails cutting into our green ways is not something that we're trying to promote I saw there's also a definition of Greenway node although the term isn't used I don't think I did a word search can find the term used in a complete sentence.

Yeah document, but that no definition was a bit broader. It could be town maintained or privately maintained at the behest of the town or with the permission of the town, something like that. I'm imagining a situation where there's a large conditional rezoning. And one of the conditions is you have to plug in your development to this greenway. And maybe the developer doesn't, the internal roads and that connection don't become transferred over to the town for maintenance. They just are privately maintained, but it's sanctioned and required by the town. And I wonder if we should somehow use that standard for this.

Yeah, and it brings up a good thing. We kind of identified that discrepancy in reviewing the draft. What is intended to be kind of the generally applicable rule is that Greenway node piece of it. I think the language you were referring to about triplexes and fourplexes, is specifically located in the use specific conditions in Article 5, I believe, of the new ordinance related to triplexes and fourplexes. But that Greenway node density bonus is supposed to apply to more than just triplexes and fourplexes. It applies in basically the lower density residential districts. And where you will see it, I agree, it's not in complete sentences, but it's in the density tables in the first half of Article 2 of the draft. Yeah, saw that. Yeah, and so that's where we lay out, if you're in an R2 district, for example, that baseline density would be two units per lot. But then there's the row under it that talks about arterials, collectors, or greenway nodes. And in R2, for example, you go from two to four units per lot. And we basically carry that logic through the next few higher intensity zoning districts. So in R3 and R4, for example, the baseline would be, like, four units per lot and then the bonus or i guess the new baseline depending on where you are in that district would just be that next increment up so four units per lot is the baseline eight units per lot if you qualify based on certain location specific requirements got it thank you

I think that's enough for tonight.

I'm wearing comfortable shoes, so.

I'll ask one more question. One last question. For the complete community, we talked a lot in the Planning Commission over the last year and a half about small area plans, and I didn't see any reference. Do you see small area planning interfacing at all with this new LUMO?

Yes and no, right? So the ordinance itself doesn't need to reference small area plans for small area plans to continue to be a very viable option for the town. I think one potential use of small area planning going forward would be, you know, we've got some of these new zoning districts that are proposed to basically become part of that toolbox, right, with the new LUMO. But many of them are not going to be, or none of the new districts are mapped with passage of the new LUMO, right? There's got to be a whole process to adopt a new zoning map before any of those new districts even have the opportunity to be put on the map. After there's kind of widespread adoption of an updated zoning map, and this is what I would recommend as best practices is Adoption of the new zoning map based on the existing comprehensive plan, including complete community. Where small area plans, my recommendation would fit into that process, is once we've gotten past that initial hurdle of, all right, we've adopted a new zoning map, we can now take a beat. We can identify parts of town where small area planning might be necessary. It's not a given that it's necessary. our kind of generally applicable comprehensive planning efforts for the town are gonna kick in as like the next thing after we adopt a new zoning map. So that process, right, may or may not suggest that small area plans are gonna be necessary or helpful in some parts of town. And so as a result of that small area planning, if it happens, we've now got this, you know, relatively new LUMO at that point that could be used to implement some of the small area planning. It's also possible that the small area planning says, hey, there's a need here that actually isn't even addressed by the new LUMO. We need a new kind of bespoke zoning district to help implement it. We need public investment to implement the small area plan. But it definitely is something that we're thinking about and that could have a really beneficial role in long-term planning.

Thank you for your time and patience. We really appreciate it. And I guess we'll see you.

Did we want to deal with the planning commission applicants?

Yeah.

Yes. Mike, did you want to?

I don't think we want to do a second round. Nobody would do one.

But we are reconvening on the other three trade-off categories in a couple weeks. September 1st, right, Taz? You don't have to get up. Just not. A couple weeks. September 1st. We'll see you then. So also a note to the public. On September 1st, we're going to do this again. Taz's presentation is going to cover three other sets of trade-offs. But we'd be happy to have anybody who's here tonight and anybody who's not here tonight back let us know what they think. So thanks for those who came and commented. We appreciate it. Now, before we adjourn, we're going to return for a bit to agenda item three, planning commission applications. So Josh, you were saying that we might want to Even if we don't want to consider the applications tonight or ever, we might want to have some sort of formal decision so that other things can get set in motion based on that?

Yes. Ultimately, the advisory board policy does ask that we bring it to the advisory board for a recommendation before it goes to council. The cleanest way to bypass that would be for the advisory board to state its intention to not endorse a candidate or endorse a candidate, however the board wants to go, but I've definitely heard some sentiment about not endorsing someone. Okay.

Thanks. Would there be...

I didn't even look at the... How many candidates were there?

Well... This is...

Yes. Are we keeping the... Would the council move forward between now and the next meeting if we... What do you want to do?

I don't think so, but I guess the question is, Do we want to?

Just say we're not recommending any of them. We're recommending all of them.

John, just a refresh. I thought we prioritized the top three when we went through them, and we made that recommendation to the council, right? We did, and that's where we stand.

We did tier the applicants. We did. We recommended multiple. It was... Just a few I think that's right, and the clerk's office has requested that we consider narrowing it down to one, because apparently the Council was unable to get a majority behind a single candidate. And it's possible that with the planning commissions further narrowing down, you know, making a single recommendation that could be enough to put somebody into a majority council vote position. Am I?

Yes, I think I've pulled up the ballot of council votes. Jeff received enough votes from council to receive reappointment. The rest of council's votes for a second member were cast, but ultimately spread across your recommendation. So ultimately no one reached the necessary four to five members to be appointed. So there's, some interest in narrowing that so that there is a candidate who will see four to five. I've also heard some interest from y'all in not making a recommendation.

Who were the top three that we recommended?

I will pull that back up off the agenda. I believe the candidates recommended what we had sent to council was a list of seven of Julia Chamberlain, Jeff Green, Mark Heinlein, Eric Valera, Strother Murray-Endinga, Peter Maniloff, and Leif Rasmussen.

And we didn't tier those?

We had those in alphabetical order.

Because we haven't met them all or interviewed them. I think we didn't feel comfortable.

I would be happy to recommend Eric and Strada, because they both were fine council members. And they got ripped off of the end of their term. And we've met them, at least the three of us have.

No, I did not. But I mean, that was the way Jeff, I remember, had the same.

I mean, I feel that.

But isn't it just one seat? So how do we?

Well, then they would only have to vote between two people. And then they could probably get a, if they wouldn't have like nine different people to vote for. Or we could recommend only one of them.

But then they would go back to John's thing where.

Yeah.

my view is that that you know appointments are inherently political and um we're not really set up to be a political body we don't want to be that's not our job and i think if the planning commission is the body making the recommendations that's typically going to skew them toward incumbents just because of awkwardness even if it's not the right answer and i'm not saying it is or isn't here

Yeah.

But I'm not sure we're adding a lot of value just by saying, yeah, we're going to recommend our friends.

Right. Well, I mean, I picked them in particular because the process cut them short.

Yeah.

And they were told that they were going to be able to finish their term, and then they didn't. That's true.

But this is for another three-year term.

Yep. Yep.

My own personal view, which may not be the majority view, is that it's really better for the council to lobby itself to get to a majority. They're allowed to talk to each other and build a coalition. And I think they would be better served by articulating to each other their own criteria and selecting somebody than having us get involved with sort of unclear impact on the result. Our involvement in the past has had, I would say, at best, unclear impact. My personal preference would be to say we really appreciate the invitation to weigh in further on this, but we don't have anything else to say.

Did they interview all the?

From what I know, council did not do an interview committee.

john they seem to be stuck and that's just to your point if it's political but we have enough you have enough experience and knowledge of two i don't call them friends because they weren't here long and they just were here a short period of time they perform well and it's it's like almost having a interview not that you don't have to have because you've been there already so between the two they are looking to you to make an advice as advisory. So make advice in one of the two. It would be your preference or because you guys know this. I'm in full support.

You know, council members can pick up the phone and ask, and they have for input from individuals or about individuals if they want. I'm just concerned about setting up a system where It has a strong appearance of being very difficult for somebody to break in who's not already part of the club. So there could be some really excellent candidates in this pool. We've never met them. They've never interviewed. It seems to me a little unfair to them to say, well, we know and found these people minimally acceptable to recommend again. So we're not going to bother exploring the other 10 that applied. We don't know them. It doesn't matter. We have enough.

It just seems like. Why didn't the council interview them? Is there a council member available? Can we ask our liaison? Why didn't you all interview the candidates?

I'm not sure why we didn't interview them. I know that I was on an interview committee for AWASA appointees. I do, as one council member, I do agree with John's concept that we got to the meeting. I don't know why, but we didn't have time to discuss it. But I think if we were to discuss among ourselves, we would be able to come to one person out of that group of people. So the short answer is I don't know why we didn't have an interview committee together. um i think it would be helpful to have the if there's going to be an interview committee to have the council do that and if the council is able to do that without an interview committee then it could expedite the process in a beneficial way for everybody so i think recommending someone or not recommending someone is a fine decision either way and the council will make its own decision either through an interview committee or through conversation as we all decide who we think would serve best. So the answer is why there was an interview committee? I don't know. I don't know.

John, let me ask you a question. Would it be helpful to the council, I don't know if John agrees, that the top four that got the two votes would be interviewed by this advisory board?

Well, I mean, it's up to each individual council member. I can speak from my own experience as being a planning commission member. It was awkward to have you all interview me Recommend me and then have another round of interviews with people who are actually the ones that appoint me so my own personal experience was Get me to the council members because they're the ones that make the decision now you may have other council members that say I Hold the Planning Commission's Recommendation in high esteem. I will use that as a part of my decision-making process. I don't know if that Has been done in the past or would be done in the future. So I

Well, I move that the planning commission chooses not to recommend a candidate to council and let them do this on their own time and schedule.

Josh, could you accept that?

OK, Liz seconds. Let's do a vote. Mike? I'm for it. OK, Liz.

Yes. Yes.

And I'm a yes, so that's four votes. So we're going to very politely and respectfully decline to further narrow down the field. And we have full confidence that the council will choose wisely.

Perfect. And we will not bring this back until we have another open seat.

Thank you. That was our last agenda item. Josh, is there anything else we should consider before we adjourn?

josh is our next meeting here also is it online yes our next meeting is in two weeks on september 1st also in person i'll also note the september 15th meeting is currently scheduled for online it is an optional lumo session i think our goal is to have the clearly scheduled lumo sessions here in person in the town hall council chambers if it's not clear that luma is going to be on the agenda and we'll work with y'all to figure out the right cadence for online versus in-person once we get past LUMO. I think that's going to drive a lot of the in-person schedule.

What do you mean it's an optional LUMO session? It might be.

What I'd say is TAS will absolutely be here on September 1st. TAS can be here on September 15th if you want to continue discussing LUMO. TAS will absolutely be here on October, the first Tuesday of October, to ask for more LUMO feedback. The dates we know are going to be in person.

When does the legislative process, I'm not using the right term, but officially open?

October. October.

Okay, so during October and thereafter at the Planning Commission meetings, we should expect to return to LUMO for purposes of developing our sort of final recommendations to Council and advice to Council on LUMO. Is that right?

Yeah, so what we've mapped out is the statutory legislative process. So one planning commission meeting, two council meetings, starting in October, going through the end of the year. um that's just the bare minimum right um if between you all and council you want to take more than that that is at that point we make uh we've got no ownership over the calendar it's entirely yours and the should we expect the first uh Tuesday in October would be our yeah meeting okay and so that would be the um the meeting in which we would ask you um to make a formal recommendation um kind of up or down on the on the lumo and with amendments or it's up or down at that point um it's your prerogative whether you would want to make uh you know how kind of uh house recommendations within that um within that yeah i mean is the idea that

When it then goes to the council, it's up or down, and whatever it is in that state, it either gets... No, no, no.

I mean, it is, and this is where, when I say once the official legislative process starts, I won't... make any promises about what the timeline looks like, because it is entirely based on the folks sitting behind the dais. It could be that on the first night when it's a possibility that somebody moves, let's adopt the new LUMO, and they just adopt it as is. It could also, maybe, weirder things have happened. But it's also very much possible that there will be motions to amend it or even just discussions about, well, I wouldn't be ready to vote for it unless it was amended in a certain way. So that legislative process is entirely based on council prerogative.

OK, last small thing I want to mention. According to the town's advisory board policy, advisory boards are supposed to have elections every September.

Yes, we last had our elections in December.

OK, but I was thinking maybe we should adhere to the policy. Why wouldn't we just adhere to the policy and have them in September? OK.

Happy to do either if you want to add it to next agenda. Ultimately, you have not yet served a year as chair. I think it's chair's prerogative.

Also, if we're going to be getting another two board members, we should win. Another two? I motion that we have the elections in December.

OK.

I'll second.

Okay, Mike? Okay.

Yep.

Okay. I'm okay with that, so we'll do it in December. Okay, great. Meeting adjourned.