Planning & Zoning - Special Meeting

Tom, Sam on line and we have Steve, Darren, Leon, myself and Lisa in the room here and we will trigger recording. We set? Yep, we're good. All right. So call our planning and zoning organization to order. Thank you for this special called meeting, and thank you for joining everybody virtual and live. Do we, somebody want to do an invocation? We will start officially here. Sure, I'll do it.

Thanks, Steve. Pray with me, please. Father, we thank you for giving us the opportunity to get together again, conduct the business for the community, help us to use our best judgment, and to depend on you for We have trouble discerning what we should do. Bless us as we go. Help us in our decisions and just have a great time. Thank you.

Thanks, Steve. So we had to do this quickly. I think most everybody in the call is aware that we have received Hannah's resignation. And Marcus, I don't know if you had heard that. Leon had heard it from someone. Yes, sir. Okay, great. Thank you. We weren't absolutely sure who all had been contacted. So with the change of that circumstance, the advisory committee, when we had a phone call, felt like we needed to have... a vote, an official vote to consider postponing and rescheduling to some future date the public meetings that we had approved at our last meeting. So we have certainly things on our plate now with search for a new director and how we approach that and to try to schedule and keep the public meetings in the same schedule we had them. would be difficult at best. Comments about that? That's the only item on the agenda for us to consider today. I see the next question. Yes, please.

Just to clarify, you're not eliminating the data center need to do the , but we're trying to figure out a different time schedule.

Exactly. I think the official language will be due to unforeseen circumstances, we're postponing and we'll reschedule at a future date. And if someone wants to make that meeting or that motion with that language or something close to that. Tom?

I think it's prudent that we postpone. I think it's imprudent that we set a, there's an expectation if our outgoing director leads a public meeting, one, that's on the schedule, and then leaves, I think it opens the door to expectations that we're not ready to fulfill.

I agree. Well, that would make it a meeting potentially starting at what date?

I think that we don't put a date out there, Sam, because we have to get a planning director first. Right. And just as important, at least one of the two governments that really funds us was very opposed to us doing this right away.

I think we have to discern what our structure of the meeting is going to be, too, because I don't think we ever defined that well. Correct.

We didn't. And we were supposed to have a meeting with our planning director about that before these ever started. And I just think that this is just really imprudent to move forward with this right now until we have a new planning director, until we... meet with the physical court to see what their interests are and then I think that we really do want that public input. But to do that today I think would be very imprudent.

I think you said it very well. That's what I was trying to make sure I said it out loud. We need to back up and discover how we're going to do business. We need to do it in while we... I don't even think you need to bring up the comment about the directive position being taken. But that certainly does impact it. But we need to delay the starting point is what we're doing. But we need to also work out the details at that time.

Dan, do you have a proposed wording that somebody can move?

Yeah, I think the wording I would suggest to people is that we vote to postpone the public meetings on data center and plan to reschedule them at a future date. Okay. And Leon is proposing that motion. Does someone want to second that?

Second it.

Marcus, thank you.

Sam? I'm discussing what's not being said, just so we're clear on here, because I like what's being said. We're not stating a date that we're going to start We're not stating a date when we're going to have something that's done. Correct. We're not tying our own hands. Correct. We have an unexpected event that we need to accommodate, and we don't have a choice.

Yes.

That's correct. the other people who are offline and then at some point within this call if we could get a look in the room and just have on camera the faces of those people who are in the room with you.

Okay. Do I know how to do that? I mean, just turning it.

You have to turn your laptop.

Everybody walk in front of the camera.

No, laptop.

It's your laptop camera.

I can do that, yes.

It's just physically turning the camera around. So we see... Alright. Who's here? Steve is there. And we see Darren and Leon... And we see Lisa over here. Does that qualify, Henry?

Awkward, I know, but it meets our requirements. Thank you. All right. Thank you. All right. And yes.

Go ahead.

I agree with Henry's comment about a roll call vote. I think that would be a nice way to do that. Right.

All right. So let me go around the room and get everybody's vote on the motion because the motion is active. Unless there is further discussion.

Did we get a second?

Yeah, second was Marcus.

Thank you.

Alright, is there any other discussion?

If you want to restate it, just for the final review.

Yeah, so the motion is...

It's postponed. I don't have the exact part.

The motion is to postpone the scheduled data center public meetings to a later date in view of unforeseen circumstances or however we will phrase that.

I think we're just postponed to a later date?

Yeah.

Yes.

I would say for the public record, let's do to unforeseen circumstances. Okay. We'll add that. Add a clarification to that. Yeah. that was in there.

And that will all, I mean, we will need to talk about advertising that and how that goes out, so we'll just make sure. Because it's been published everywhere on Facebook and email and everywhere. All right. Roll call. Tom? Ruby? Aye. Sam Collier? Aye. Marcus Hawkins? Aye. Steve Griffin? Aye. Darren Farr. Aye. Leon Smothers. Aye. Dan Noleta is aye. So we have a unanimous vote. All right. Henry, does that cover us in terms of the agenda item that we have? It does, Mr. Chair. All right. Thank you. And then just for information to the rest of the commission, we have given the advisory committee and personnel committee have met by phone so that we could consider the resignation in front of us. We've directed Henry to post the job position again. That's out. And certainly if any of us have candidates that we know about. We need to direct them to apply and meet the information that's there. We are in receipt of three resumes and three applicants already. And so we'll have some discussion with the personnel committee about how we follow through with that and proceed. Does that make sense to everybody? Henry's collecting those. Henry is collecting those. And at an appropriate point, Henry, you said you will have to recuse yourself.

And I think that will come at the time when there's discussion of candidates. But as far as advertising and conveying those to the committee, my office will be handling that going forward.

All right. Very good. Yeah.

One of the candidates has... Let me ask you why you have to recuse yourself. Do you know one of the candidates? Yes, and I prefer not to discuss it during the course.

Great. That's great. Thank you.

Yeah. And personnel committee for reminder is Steve and myself and Tom, I believe. We added Tom to the personnel committee as of the last set of organization decisions with the personnel committee.

All right. May I also suggest that we, I'm not sure what exactly the proper way to do this is, but maybe have a commission set up to give a good starting point for ordinances regarding data centers. Whether that's in, if we need to do that in conjunction with magistrates or if that's totally separate, I don't know, don't care, but I think we need to start, we need, We need to start developing the starting point for the discussions so that we can enter these public meetings with, here's what we're thinking about, and tell us what you like, tell us what you don't like, tell us what you want to see in it. If we've missed something, as opposed to going in with just a blank slate, tell us what you don't like about data centers.

Right. I was going to make the same kind of suggestion. Instead of just having dead time until we get a new planning director, we could actually have an ad hoc committee or something to start putting together some of the ideas that people are talking about, both ideas on how to handle the public meetings as well as some of the talking points that we should have for people to be able to handle that.

How long is their moratorium that they set?

The moratorium is for 12 months, so it expires in July. Next year. Next July. So, you know, in order to allow the legislative bodies to get approval and time, we would need to have approved an ordinance on our side probably by April. Just think about the timeframe and how that works and giving them time to get through their meeting schedules and second readings. And some people may think that's a little brief for their approval.

Earlier would be better. The earlier we can get this done, the better.

Earlier would be better. And so to your point, we could direct the advisory committee to take that draft, or we could decide we want to create an ad hoc committee to do some work on an ordinance. I mentioned to Leon before we started this meeting that I have in my hands three model ordinances that I can share to whoever's on that committee and have done research around what the components of those model ordinances are. So we can start, we have a starting point. And that's stuff that our director has collected as well.

I have a few ideas. Yes, Marcus. In regards to how to better get public input without them necessarily being in front of a mic or on screen. I didn't know if now is the time to talk about that or if we talk about that in a later meeting.

I think we have a few minutes to open to suggestions if you want.

Okay.

Yes, a suggestion.

If we had... Hold on. Wait a second. Sam, did you... Be careful. We have a special meeting called for this.

Right. One agenda item. You're right. I'm sorry.

Could we close it and then discuss since we have a quorum?

I'm going to back out after the agenda item is done.

Yeah. So, Henry, for those of us who are here, can we adjourn the meeting and then continue some discussion if we don't have a quorum?

Yes, although I think probably the most prudent quorum... September 23rd meeting.

Okay. All right. Marcus, are you okay with that? Yes. Either that or reach out to me directly. We can have some discussion.

Yes. We can have conversation directly. That way you can, I guess, convey some of this in the advisory committee. Yes, exactly.

Can we say we've identified out of this meeting that, A, we need to have a... going in, starting place to start discussions with the open hearing so we can review a proposed ordinance, or not proposed ordinance, that's way too short. I'm sorry.

Don't we have to determine what we're having this public meeting about? We haven't done that yet. What's the forum going to be about? Is it a Q&A?

There you go. Okay, very good. We need to find that. And then I like Marcus's idea of how do we help, how do we facilitate getting input from the public that's not in front of camera, whether it's online, you know, they can post concerns online or something.

Send it via email, drop it at the window.

We have a fairly open topic on the agenda as to how to proceed with...

So I think that we're discussing and we would have an agenda item on the... meeting next Wednesday. So our regular called meeting in September. And we can bring in all kinds of topics.

Could we do an ad hoc committee of something less than quorum that helps put together the structure of what we're trying to do?

We can have that discussion Wednesday. Because otherwise it's an item that's not on the agenda here today. Gotcha. Okay. Perfect. Okay. All right. So with that, I think I can take a motion to adjourn. So moved. All right. All in favor? Aye. All right. Thank you all.