Town Council - workshop

Good evening and welcome to the Town of Garner Council Work Session of August 25, 2026. It's another beautiful day in Garner, so beautiful because there's not another 90-degree day in sight. We're happy to be here. We'll start by calling the meeting to order and Council roll call from the Town Clerk, please.

Mayor Gupton.

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Dellinger.

Here.

Council Member Matthews.

Here.

Council Member Singleton. Here. Council Member Stallings. Here. Council Member Vance.

Here. Thank you. And that brings us to item B on our agenda, which is adoption of the agenda. I'm going to ask council members for a motion and a second. so move second uh motion by mr vance second by mr stallins if there's no discussion i'll call for a voice vote all in favor of adopting the agenda please signify by saying aye aye opposed by nay hearing none passes unanimously item c no presentations this evening which brings us right along to d our discussion items and this is one of our favorite parts development previews we don't have to make decisions we don't have to vote on these we're just here to get a preview to learn a little bit about your project and for you to get a little feedback from council on this so that being said let's start with our first one in regards to east garner middle school and our presenter this evening for the staff is our assistant planning director miss aaron joseph

good evening mayor council members good to see you all this evening i'll just give a brief introduction for both of the developer previews for this evening i don't want to eat into their time too much so the first developer preview this evening is for east garner middle school The applicant, Sarah Van Every of McAdams, has submitted a general rezoning request on behalf of Wake County Board of Education. They are the property owners. As stated, this is a general district rezoning request. It's 38.98 acres. They are requesting to rezone from light industrial to residential four. The property is located at 6301 Jones Sausage Road. And so this is the site here. You have the existing middle school and then the surrounding parcel is the area that the applicant is seeking to rezone. Staff has reviewed the request. being that it is a general rezoning, there are no proffered conditions or site-specific master plan. All applicable standards within the UDO, all permitted uses within the UDO are subject to the general rezoning. And so that has been the primary that staff has provided to the applicant given council's concern with tier one conditional rezonings. We thought it prudent to let them know that a general rezoning, you may want to modify that application to a conditional rezoning. So far that's all we have really commented on this application. And so I will, pass the microphone to Ms. Van Every and let her preview this request to you all this evening.

Thank you. If you would join us at the podium and identify yourself, name and address.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, Council. Thank you for having us this evening. Pleasure to be here. For the record, my name is Sarah Van Every with McAdams, 621 Hillsborough Street, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27603. With me tonight, I have Kenneth Haywood with Wake County Public School System. I also have Alice Reese and Shane Webster from the school system and Matt Peach from Santec for traffic. And I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Haywood and we'll begin our presentation. Thank you.

Good to be here again, Mayor, members of the council, Kenneth Haywood with the Howard Sellers Law Firm, 5410 Trinity Road in Raleigh. I want to start a little different than when I was before you, what, a year or so ago when we were talking about North Garner and the wonderful campus that we discussed at that time. And what I'll share with you is, this is amazing. Let me go back in time. Tonight we have the opportunity to talk about a school that has its origins in this town in 1936. If any of you have not reviewed the living history of this school, it's available on YouTube. And we start with the Gardner Consolidated School in 1936, a way for citizens of this town who did not earlier have the opportunity to have education be provided education. We now trace our roots from that to now in 2026, now known as East Gardner Magnet Middle School, We are looking at the next chapter. We now have the ability in collaborating with you to put competition track and field, the availability to have state-of-the-art fields for football, soccer for these students. And what I see and what the team here sees is just the next evolution of this wonderful history that I mentioned a minute ago. So we go from 10 acres back in 1936 that had started where the original school was located to now what we're talking about today with the acreage that staff have presented to you. So what's our request? We already own, if you can go to the slide showing the rezonings We already own here what's in yellow, which is R2. That's our main campus, which all of you are familiar with in terms of what we have there. And then we purchased in 2021 what you see in the other color, which is light industrial. But it's all 1 campus to us, so what we want to do is we now want to be able to build into the purple area. The remaining of our property. Fields and also a. A new driveway to help with traffic and get it on to our campus. And that's it. And so you're asking yourselves and staff's already said, and I've heard a lot of this. Well, Kenneth, why are you going or 2 to our 2 general. Zoning no conditions and the answer I've got for each of you. Is the fact that there is nothing vertical going on. To the part that we're asking for resuming, it is going to be grass. Fields track and fields and most there may be a restroom to accommodate that. But normally, when we look at conditions and all of you are familiar. With this, when we've done this before is we're building a building we're building in addition to ability. We're building something that's going vertical and we have concerns about making sure. That you and looking at to the citizens of Gardner are being. That your questions. And their questions are being addressed here. We've had neighborhood meetings. No, 1 has voiced any issues at all. And the reason is to have tying this up with a lot of conditions. Which aren't relevant to the site, because there's nothing really we can talk about in terms of conditions. We went with a general rezoning. Another reason, Shane Webster's here. Shane is the board's liaison with the alumni group. Many of you may know we have a very active alumni group for the historical purposes that I mentioned a few minutes ago. And so we have an alumni group who is, vested with what we're going to do on the campus. We're talking with them and we want to make sure that we provide every opportunity to what they would like in terms of looking what we're going to do on the R2 site that's already properly zoned. So we need to get the light industrial R2. It's R2 instead of R4, just so you'll know in terms of staff's presentation. We want to align this to R2 so that as a matter of right, we have the ability to have a school, which is not the way it's currently zoned today when we bought the property in 2021. And so that's why we're just going with what's called a straight rezoning. It's because we're gonna have one school campus that's R2. We're gonna be building a field. We're gonna be building a track. That's what we're building here. And so I didn't see any reason for us to be able to try to start looking at a tier one or a tier two when we're not putting anything that would normally be subject to some type of condition. I will mention to you in terms of what we are doing in this particular area, as I mentioned, we're going to have a competition track. We're going to have a field for football and soccer and softball enclosed with it, surrounded by the track. So that is what is going on here. we are just to give you a little teaser in terms of the site that does not need rezoning which is where the east garner magnet musical is today we're getting rid of all the mobiles so all the mobiles that are there that are in and around the water tower in those areas they're going away that's going to be part of what we're going to be doing when we look to the um the renovations in terms of the main campus And so we're here, we wanna answer any questions you have about the rezoning or anything else that we can. I will share with each of you that we are very, very early in the design phase. We are not able tonight to necessarily tell you exactly what we're doing on the campus because we are still working with the designers. We're still working with the alumni group to get feedback from them. And so as to that piece, which is not part of the rezoning we're talking about tonight, that's going to be a challenge for us to be able to get into anything other than a very 30 000 foot maybe 60 000 foot first review of what we're going to do there because we're so early in it but we can generally tell you um you know what our renovations are what our thought process in terms of the renovations but what we're really here tonight to talk to you about is what's in green and what you're going to see in green which is now heavily wooded is what's going to turn into the track and the field you'll see the very bottom there Along, let me get my glasses back on so that I can read street names here. Along what I will say, this is a north-south orientation. The loop around the very bottom, that's where we're gonna be putting the driveway that I was talking about adjacent to that road. And so that's where we're gonna be having this driveway come in to help us with a little bit of our traffic circulation. But other than that driveway there, the rest of the site's gonna be, like I said, our track and field um and so i'll turn it back over to sarah to see if there's anything else she wants to have she was the original applicant for the school system that's all i have but we're going to be able to answer um questions that we can about our rezoning request to change this from light industrial into an r2 zoning so that we can then have the school campus developed out to its full potential

Thank you, Kenneth. I know one of the things that we look at and that staff will look at when rezonings, whether general tier one or tier two, are brought before you is you're going to compare them to your Garner Forward to the future land use plan and map, understanding that that is an important document for guiding future development in Garner. So I did just want to take a moment that we did look into this and looked at The Garner Forward plan looked at the character typology, which recommends employment centers. The development change in intensity is a level three for areas to enhance. The priority infrastructure and investment area is a tier two non-residential, so infill investment. And the Garner Forward framework, it's not within any of the activity center buffers. understanding that the residential, the R2 zoning district, while it does allow for the school use, understanding that there may be some concern of how that zoning is consistent with the land use plan for employment centers, as we typically don't see a residential zoning in that recommended land use type. However, as Kenneth pointed out, this is not your typical development case that is before you. This is Wake County public school system. This is the largest employer in Wake County. By default, this is part of that largest employer in Wake County. by that does in our perspective fit that character typology so i did just sort of want to round that out and when we look at the zoning and we're looking at that future land use but i think that this particular user here does still fit with that so again this is really at that 30 60 000 level foot this is mainly for the use for the school which is not currently allowed in the li district so if the school use was allowed in the li district we wouldn't be here tonight so we're just here to ask for the rezoning so that we can expand the athletic facilities and continue to provide school services for about the next generation of garner so with that we'll be happy to take any questions thank you so much

Yes, thank you very much. Very informative. We appreciate you coming in to give us a development preview early in the process so we can get our thoughts together and help this move smoothly and help you avoid wasting time and money as we go. Everybody's a big fan of East Corner Middle School. My grandson and granddaughters went there. It has quite the history. With that, we'll start with Mr. Vance for questions. We'll come down and circle back around.

But yes, I heard it mentioned, Ms. Van Avery, that the alumni associations are currently a part of the early planning process and being involved with this whole effort here with this rezoning. Can you name the alumni association?

I'm going to allow Shane Webster, who is the liaison I spoke to, council member. He has the most information about that. I'll let him answer your question and provide any other information you may need.

Good evening. Shane Webster with Wake County Public Schools, 5820 North Beaver Lane, Raleigh. Yes, the Garner Consolidated Alumni Association is the group that we're working with, and we're in the early stages of design, but we're coordinating schedules for them to participate in our design meetings going forward, probably starting in September.

Okay, the Garner Consolidated is the one you coordinate. Okay. Thank you for answering the question. That's all I have, Mr. Mayor.

Hey, Mr. Dellinger.

Yeah, I really have a question. Just sort of want to make it kind of public for the record on what is allowed by right into R2. So it's kind of amorphous if you're not listing off the things. Single family detached, two family dwelling, manufactured homes, group care, special use permit would allow assembly, civil, Civil service and fraternal organizations, also by right, community center, school, primary or secondary. Emergency services require special use permit. Cemetery is permitted by right. Religious institution, golf course or country club. Horse stables would require special use permit. Public parks, passive open space, nature park would be permitted by right, bed and breakfast would be special use permit, and in-home family child care or family care and home care. So I was just reading that for the record and then minor utility stuff in agriculture. So just trying to give the public an awareness of what this broader general rezoning would allow I think one of the things that is unique about this is that an expansion of an existing facility's capacity and function versus a changeover or a disproportionate use. And I think, too, just again, we all care about the schools and education and improving them. So those are all sort of factors to weigh in the decision. But I think it's important that we support the expansion of the campus and facility.

at our schools if we can.

We're not being in the way anyway. That's my only comment.

Okay, Mr. Stallings. No questions at this time. Mr. Singleton.

Yes, but before I say that, Mr. Haywood was referencing the history. I went there when it was East Garner Junior High, and the original building was there. It was called the 8th grade building. It was the H building, because it was shaped like an H. So I went there with that and the old gym, which we called the barn, because it was old, and the floor was slick. But a couple of questions. As we see this on here, The red line goes around the former alert cable TV building. Is that part of the rezoning also because the red line separate or is that that's not y'all's property?

Right. So you've got the water tank that is actually not our part. But in terms of the telecommunications, that's not part of the school property. That's not property that we're looking to resume tonight.

Okay, so that's not included in the rezoning. Okay.

And to your point, in terms of what you're telling me, if I could, in terms of your history of the school, what Shane was telling me is that the first building, Building D, what we used for 1961, is when that was put on this campus.

Called Building D? Was it D?

Yep, Building D. D. D as in David. Okay, D. Was the first building in 1961. Okay.

Now, are you talking that building on here in the back that's still on the campus or is that no longer here?

More on the side. Toward the back? That's the one that we have right now.

We can't see her pointer on our screen.

That building right there.

We were there. We called it the ninth grade building. It was the only one that had the library, had air conditioning, and the principal's office had air conditioning. The rest of the school had no air conditioning. So when I hear all this news about kids not having air conditioning, anyway, it's a different world. And the old shop building is there. So there are going to be, this rezoning is, not request, has nothing to do with the current campus because the school can go back there. But there will be improvements made to the existing campus in the long-range plan with what we're doing here. This is not just a field. This is for a complete campus update.

Correct. In addition to the field, the main campus itself is going to go through moderate to more than moderate renovation work. on some of the buildings that are there. This is not going to be like North Garner where we're tearing everything down, we're moving things around. That's not this one. This is just going to be a renovation of the campus in terms of what's going to be going on in the different buildings, Councilor.

Okay. I just wanted to confirm, because where you're going with the field space, where we used to play field space, it's not there anymore. I know it's got the mobile units on it. So the improvements that will be made to the building on the campus, as you stated, will the mobile units will disappear.

Okay.

That's the long-range plan. The mobile units will disappear. That's fine. I just need to nod. That's good. Yes. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you.

Mr. Matthews. Good presentation. I think it'll be a great improvement. It's great, and they're going to do even more later on, and I'm glad you guys took advantage of the early previews like we're doing here, and I hope all the developers will pick up on that. It's a great time to have a good casual conversation and

Or like at Christmas when you think there's a baseball bat on the tree, but you're not quite sure until you open it up. So, right, I agree with that as well. And, you know, I really appreciate the three of us have been doing this for a long time. And every time I come, I really appreciate all your comments and how much you love the town and how much you support the school system over the years. So thank you, Ken, and I for that.

Looks good. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Thank you. We'll run back around. Mr. Vance, do you have anything else?

Yes, going back to the history of Gronach Consolidated, are there any structures that are currently historical on the property?

What I understand is this, council member, is that in 1936 it was not on this campus. it was the first building in this campus was in 61. And so we tie our lineage all the way back to the Garner Consolidated in terms of the students, student population, but in terms of the actual building, we go 60 plus years ago in terms of what the first building was.

And I don't know whether, how many of the buildings, Building D, for example, is the same?

Yes, so apparently the first building is going to continue to stay with the renovation work that's going to happen. Will it maintain its historical character?

Will it maintain its historical character? Yes. Okay, that's all I have.

Thank you. Mr. Dellinger?

No further questions.

Mr. Dellinger? No questions. Singleton? No questions. Wow. Well, thanks for your presentation. There's no decisions we have to make tonight, and there weren't a lot of feedback, so you must be on the right track. Thank you very much, and we'll see you when you come back for the public hearing. Thank you. Thank you. And that takes us to Section 1.2 of the agenda, which is a preview, again another preview, for Tier 2 Conditional Rezoning Request related to 4901 TV Tower Road. And again, our Assistant Planning Director, Ms. Erin Joseph, is going to give us a little background.

Yes, thank you. So again, Ms. Sarah Van Every is representing the property owner. She represents McAdams Firm. This request along TV Tower Road, the site is located at 4901 TV Tower Road. It is a tier two conditional rezoning. They are requesting, the developer is requesting to rezone 2.60 acres from rural agricultural to commercial mixed use conditional for the development of a convenient store with fuel sales. The applicant has submitted their first round of submittal items that includes the site specific master plan as well as a list of written conditions and a narrow list of permitted uses within the conditional district. What you have on the screen is what they have submitted thus far for the master plan so you can see the building layout and the parking storm water control measure and some landscaping features. So to date staff has provided one round of comments. Primarily the comments centered on ensuring that the conditions are aligned with the Garner Forward Comprehensive Plan and that any conditions proffered are above minimum standards of the UDO. a commitment to open space given that non-residential development is no longer required to commit to open space, so we've asked them to commit to that. Also, there are several conditions that deviate from the minimum standards within the UDO. with a tier two conditional rezoning, an applicant can modify dimensional standards as long as there is an alternative means of compliance that is in line with the spirit of the unified development ordinance. So we've made several comments for them to address, such as the tree preservation minimum requirements, Perimeter buffers, they have requested to reduce the perimeter buffer, reduce the percentage of tree preservation area. Engineering made a comment pertaining to the required rope frontage improvements. and that a cul-de-sac or another turnaround will be required on TV Tower Road to accommodate a fire apparatus. So those are, like I said, the primary comments that staff has provided to the applicant at this time. We have not received their second submittal, so we will allow them to speak to what they are working on currently, thank you.

Good evening, Mayor, Councilmembers, Worth Mills with Longleaf Law Partners. I'll give Sarah a little bit of a break. But I'm here on behalf of Impeccable Development, who is the rezoning applicant for this case. Daniel Hernandez and Kevin Sanders are here as members of Impeccable. Also with our team this evening, Sarah Van Every with McAdams and Rinal Stephenson with DRMP. As Ms. Joseph mentioned, this is a Tier 2 rezoning request to rezone this 2.6 acres to CMX conditional to facilitate a convenience store with fuel sales use. So as you can see here, the two properties, 4901 TV Tower Road and 0 Highway 70, make up 2.6 acres located at the intersection of TV Tower Road and Highway 70. There's an existing single family home on the 4901 TV Tower Road parcel today. Across TV Tower Road, is the Camping World Business. Garner Business Park is to our north on the opposite side of 70 and then farther south off the screen is the WRAL-TV transmitter tower. So these two properties are near the eastern limits of Garner's ETJ. This will be sort of the eastern gateway into Garner. The purple shaded areas that you see on the right hand side are part of Clayton's ETJ. The corporate limits are a little bit smaller, as you can see in the red shaded areas, but Camping World and Garner Business Park are currently within the town's limits. Phase two of the complete I-540 project will change this area significantly. This slide shows the proposed work in this area, 540 shown horizontally. Our property is just at the southern tip of the Highway 70 improvements, which have sort of an orange shade to them. This completion of I-540 is going to bring more cars, more people into this area and increase the need for fueling station in this area. So this area itself has been transformed with the development of the Garner Business Park. As you can see on the progression of aerial photos on the screen, the proposed fueling station here will serve not only those future cars and trips, it will also serve these employees that now frequent Garner Business Park every day. This slide shows the topography of the site. I wanted to highlight this. It's sort of a key challenge within designing this site and is driving some of the modifications to the UDO. So the site itself falls towards the middle from both the east and west, and some prior work along 70 is causing drainage issues to originate on the north side of 70, flow over to our site, and then sort of remain there as standing water until it slowly releases to the south. So as part of our concept plan, we are trying to improve those existing drainage conditions. The two properties are currently zoned RA. The properties to our south and to our east are zoned RA as well. Camping World is zoned CMX conditional. Garner Business Park is zoned a mix of LI, LI conditional, and HI conditional. And the property to our southwest, part of that WRAL-TV transmitter tower, that property is zoned highway district. That is part of the Wake County zoning. But there are lots of intense zoning districts in this area, whether it's Town of Garner or Wake County. So the four policy maps shown on the screen I think highlight the town's recommendations for a convenience store fueling station in this area. The top left is the character typology map, which designates these properties as employment area. A gas station near the future Highway 70 and I-540 interchange can help serve those employment uses and those employees. The development change and intensity map on the top right designates these properties as level three areas to enhance. That designation recommends strategic infill development to complement established employee hubs with Garner Business Park toward north. I think that this rezoning meets that description. And then lastly, the framework map in the bottom right We have access off of both TV Tower Road and Highway 70. TV Tower, you know, exiting onto there to get onto 70 would be full movement, and then the driveway on 70 would be right in, right out. Those drainage and topographic issues that I mentioned earlier are causing us to have to grade within a portion of the required buffer, specifically to those RA zone properties pretty much directly south of the parking lot. we have created that variable width buffer in the southeast corner as opposed to just a straight line 45 foot wide buffer that the UDO would otherwise require. And you can see some of that highlighted here between what the buffer by code would require versus what our proposed variable buffer width would require. The site is almost fully wooded today. The site is surrounded by offsite forest, which also provides for meaningful buffers to those adjacent properties. And then looking at TV Tower Road, today it is an unimproved road that provides access to this site, Camping World, and to the Transmitter Tower. Ideally, Impeccable would improve that portion of TV Tower up to its... uh drive what proposed driveway entrance while also ensuring that there is sufficient uh turnaround for those emergency vehicles we'll continue to work with staff on that condition language and making sure that this is a safe entrance and exit for not only our patrons but other folks as well And then on the zoning condition front, we have offered a permitted use table, although again, the goal here is to develop that fueling station. We've prohibited tobacco and vape shops. The rest of our conditions to date really speak to that UDO relief sought due to the topographic and drainage challenges that are occurring on it today. uh which include 10 of the site reserving that as tree canopy uh street yard encroachments for our trash container and parking spaces along tv tower road and then those grading impacts into the buffers and we are looking to offer architectural conditions as we continue to flesh out this rezoning with staff So thank you for allowing us to present this case. Our team's here to answer any questions, and we look forward to continuing to refine this reasoning. Thank you.

Thank you. That's a lot of good information, a lot of good logic about this spot and about its potential use. I may go out on a limb and echo a common concern or a common thought from our council members, is the more that we see big highways and big infrastructure coming along, and the more we see that people are eager to live here and work here, the higher opinion we have of our property that's out there. and our expectations are increased and we expect more, and we ask for more every time we can think of something that could be a little bit better, because each of these projects will be with us a long time. And while this one makes a lot of sense, I like your turnaround and other things, i can't help but think what else could we accomplish with it in addition to what you're doing here for example to borrow a page from mr singleton's playbook where are the open fields for the kids to play on and you might say well what kids there's no neighborhood but i'm thinking about when mom was over there picking out a new rv next door maybe dad and the kids come over here to get a snack and they've got 30 minutes or two hours to kill What are the chances that you could do something that would more enhance their experience or their use over here in terms of little picnic areas nearby that they could sit outside? And I also seem to have acquired a personal distaste for what I'm considering mud holes. These open, only one use storm water control measures. These all just turn out, unless they're carefully designed, they turn out to be just an eyesore and a mud hole. And I have talked to some of our developer friends, property owner friends, who said they were reluctant to build the underground structure but once they did they realized the maintenance was so much less and it gave them more parking and more usable space or in this case more perhaps open area a play area dog park for your travelers i'm just trying to think what else could you possibly do that would be of value to our residents and our travelers who might be our future residents so i'm just planting that seed and i'm sorry if i stole your uh I've heard that I can almost, but you can say it again when it comes back to you. Mr Matthews questions comments.

Picked out a good location, obviously, with the loop coming through there and as I'm reflecting, I think the nearest fueling stations up there guy wrote somewhere on that corner on the right and. So you've got a great location. I like the concept you've got here and the layout. I'm kind of with the mayor on his mud hole over there because, you know, that can be a mud hole. Here lately it's what all of them are anyway. It's just a hole out there and people throw and step in. So that could be something to consider is to modify it to some way where it would be a little bit more useful and it would look good. That would kind of be my only concern with it. But other than that, the project looks good. Mr. Singleton.

Yes, to follow up on the buffer, it's roughly the same amount of square feet. So would the buffer, whether it be the pink buffer or the green buffer, that's undisturbed buffer, or is that planted buffer? The site would be clear where the trees are, and that would be a new type of buffer through plantings.

Yeah, the green area is where we're proposing undisturbed buffer. Okay.

And so that's what the pink area was too then, right? Both of them were undisturbed or?

Yes. Okay.

So that leaves a little area where the retention pond is and some flat area just based off the south of the retention pond. There's a little flat area there. I'm assuming that's what that is, the flat on topography is.

Right, I can take you back there, too, and obviously we'll have to grade this site, but yeah, the biggest concerns are, sorry, did I go too far?

Gotcha, I see more from that one.

I didn't go back, I went the other way.

parking lot on the site. So I definitely wanted to thank you for that. I did have a question for Ms. Joseph. I know that she had pulled up in the staff presentation some recommendations as I understand that staff had made to the applicant. If I can see those.

I'll have to exit out of their presentation.

Yeah, that's fine. I guess my question is with the conversation being had between staff and the applicant, is there any of these things that staff have recommended that you plan on incorporating into the final product?

So we've got to continue to work through the road frontage improvements and the scope of that on TV Tower. That'll certainly be a part of future zoning conditions. And then So we have modified our tree preservation and perimeter buffer zoning conditions because we knew that we needed that relief. And we haven't done as much of that sort of collaboration with staff yet because I think we wanted to have this conversation first. I think our goal moving forward, we understand that we need the relief. How do we get some alternative means of compliance that speaks to the intent of the code? So I think that's the next step for us as we continue to build out these zoning conditions a little bit more.

Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Dellinger.

Yes. The first thing is, yeah, thanks for doing the Tier 2. The concern I have is if you're going to do fuel sales and convenience, you need to pare down your permitted uses to reflect the end product. There's a long list of permitted uses, and you all have not stricken in any or many of those. Is that correct? I'm seeing vehicle sales, veterinary clinic.

I can't speak to how many we've stricken, but I would agree it is a pretty broad list of uses. Okay.

And that just goes back to sort of highest and best use and highest tax value and fuel sales and convenience stores are high-value properties, revenue-generating properties. So I think that'd just be another practice with sitting with staff to make sure you're paring down to the ultimate, what the project is. With regards to the, it's a very topographically challenging piece of property. It looks like you're bringing in a lot of water from other parcels as well. Is that the case?

I might need Aaron. Could you take us back to my presentation, please?

I can pull back up that topo map.

You can see it there, so the high points of the site are on its eastern and western buffers and everything falls inward to that statement water.

Pit that you see on the screen and so you've got also the parcels that are to the south draining.

Into this parcel, so the water is draining from the north across 70. And you can see that line there across the head wall on the north side. So that water's coming from the north and then running through our site to our southern neighbor.

you're taking on more water than you're pushing out, for sure. So that gives me a little, you know, on the stormwater, you have some challenges there. I think for, under normal circumstances, I would be 100% gung-ho on underground. I'd be a little bit more flexible, however, and you've got some challenging, it's a challenging piece of property. But I would look at a model that does have the underground. Again, I understand you're taking a lot more water than you're shedding. And I say that with looking at the model of being able to possibly increase the footprint of a building by adding more parking or more pumps or finding a way to offset that and getting more usable space out of the parcel. Like I said, I understand with the buffer, it is very constrained on that eastern part of the parcel. That would be my feedback is kind of look at a scenario with that and see if the numbers work out and maybe get a larger footprint of a building or something like that. Last question I have is, is the applicant going to develop the site or are they a broker?

I believe that they would develop the site.

Okay.

I'll take that answer. Well, I'll say yes. I guess they're back in the yard. You're going to develop the site.

Okay. That's what we're going to do. Yep. I say that just that'll help with the winnowing down of the uses. We don't want to be in a situation where somebody, people come in, they get a lot of uses and they flip the property and, you know, put something else, put a site plan in the trash. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Vance. No questions. Okay. Any other questions you thought of in the meantime? All right. Well, thank you very much. And if there's anything to be learned, just listen to staff. If they make a suggestion, we expect you to do it. They know what to do. But good luck with your project. I think you're doing it.

Gave you an update on some of the progress that have been made toward the master development agreement. with the Downtown Opportunity site and we had told you we would come back at the end of the month to provide you yet another update. We are joined online tonight, I believe, by our partners at LMG and DFI. They were logging in earlier and there was some communication that I will take full responsibility for having calls by sending a link that we had to resend to them. So we hope that they are on with us tonight. So can I check, Peter, are you on tonight with us? Or Connor?

Sorry, I had to find the unmute button. Peter's okay.

All right, Peter. Thank you. Just want to make sure you were there. All right. So Ms. Jones and I were going to provide an update tonight in your packet. Ms. Jones provided a memo and a summary of the MDA. What we wanted to mention to you tonight or share with you tonight when we were here in August the 4th, we had several things that we had accomplished. We had reviewed the alternative financial and ownership structures to make sure we had the best model going forward. We did that and our partners at DFI agreed that we were doing the best structure for this that we could. We developed a model for operational maintenance of the parking deck and a strategy for long-term infrastructure maintenance and then validated some of the key components of the master development deal and the MDA with DFI. There were several things that we told you at the time that we still had to do some work on. So we're currently working through the final language now, but the first several items confirming the structure of the parking lease agreement, developing a parking lease model that meets regulatory statutory requirements, and finalizing a revenue generation model, all those are being finalized now and the language that will be in the final MDA will have those taken care of. Generally, the structure that we're working on is to take the proceeds from the sale of the property and keep those in reserves so that we have a reserve to build on for future structural maintenance of the parking deck that the town will own and then the rent payments that will be made right now. We're planning to start in the third year. Those rent payments from LMG would go into that reserve. We would build that reserve over time at such time that the town would need to make any kind of structural repairs or repairs beyond general maintenance to the parking structure. We have a revenue stream in place, and I think this is an important part of the plan because we aren't always able to structure those kind of maintenance costs ahead of time, and with this project, we're able to plan ahead for that. We told you earlier we need to determine the structure of the condominium model. We're still working on that, but what we've done is actually made the condominium documents a part of the required things that would need to be done before the actual closing. So rather than having to have the final structure of those documents done before you sign the MDA, we're going to be working on those simultaneously. And so you'll see those as a condition precedent for closing. One of the things that we said we had not finalized last time was evaluating affordable housing options. I'm going to turn this over to Peter in a few moments to address that. We also mentioned incorporating language for the Blue Ridge Affordable Tax Loophole. That language has been provided by Attorney Jones, and it is in the draft that we are working on and has been agreed to by LMG. And then the last thing that we mentioned was creating a timeline for key project milestones. So I'll come back to the timeline in a moment, but I wanted to to turn this over to Peter now. And he was gonna share some thoughts on commitments and strategies around affordable housing. So Peter, I'll turn it over to you.

Good evening. I'm not sure, I promise I'm not being rude, but I don't think I can turn my camera on. So trust me, I'm here. We are well on our way into the planning and getting towards the final sort of closing process. on the project and as we've discussed in the past, we had previously made a commitment to workforce and affordable with a small A units in the building. And we want to make sure that we're very, very deliberate and explicit about what we're committing to. We think we can increase the previous commitment that we made so that we would have 15% of our units as affordable, meaning that 10% of them, and Connor, kick me if I get the numbers wrong here, but with the numbers we've run through as recently as this afternoon, was that 10% of the units would be at 80% of AMI and 5% of the units would be at 60% of AMI. I'll pause for a second. Connor, can you confirm?

That is correct. I would leave it at 10 units and 5 units because it's a 102 unit project, but that's essentially what we got to.

Okay, so hopefully that addresses some questions that came up the last time we were, we were here. We also want to talk about more qualitative approaches to that. Connor, if you want to spend a minute talking about what you had documented the other day, in terms of how we might approach city employees, community center and the like.

Yeah, I mean, I think from a qualitative standpoint, this project is 91% studios and one bedrooms. So naturally, we're targeting that workforce audience. I think part of the reason Peter probably likes me to speak towards this is I kind of would fit into that realm of who we're probably targeting with this project. You know, we're looking at younger individuals, people in the workforce, town employees, police officers, nurses, teachers, etc. And kind of our goal would be to establish a preferred employer program and local workforce programs that offer incentives like waived application fees and other minor incentives to those individuals like myself to where those items go a long way, as well as connecting with the local retail there on Main Street. We'd have a leg up on any other residential competition from that standpoint as well. So there'd be obvious synergies there and trying to connect with local businesses, not just their workforce, but also from a retail standpoint, trying to offer incentives to get the customers of those retail opportunities into our doors and our tenants into theirs as well. There'd be a lot of good opportunities for overlap as well. And then, yeah, I don't, Peter, you can speak to anything that we've done in Kannapolis or Gastonia in the past that's been successful from that same standpoint.

Well, it's not a unique request from a town or a city one way or the other. We do it everywhere now. So this is right down the center of the plate for LMG. It is why we design the projects the way we design them. It's why our mixes are what they are, because we want to continue to create the naturally occurring affordable housing And I know it was important to you all that we make a commitment to specific numbers. And so we wanted to make sure we did that today. So with that, John, I'll give it back to you unless there was something else specific you wanted us to address.

Thank you, Peter. I'll pause here, though, before we go forward and just see if Council has any questions or comments about the housing component or anything else that you wanted to directly ask LMG. And we can circle back around to them at the end as well. I'll pause here and see if Council has questions for you specifically about your housing comments.

Thank you. A lot of good information, Peter and Connor. Seems like we've been working on this one for a long time. We've been through COVID, been through inflation, rate changes. Glad to see we're still working. I'll start with Mr. Vance this time and come down the row for questions or comments.

i have no specific questions about the uh about the housing component however i'm thinking about the uh the the major infrastructure improvements that will be necessary for this particular project are we too early in the process to even consider those now within the development no significant infrastructure that is needed for the project of course we are talking about the parking structure but water sewer road system some of the key things that we typically would be thinking about are already in place as we designed the rec center those were thought of in advance Is it possible to start looking at grants and other financial support that can help drive the cost down for this particular project?

I think, well, the developers team are doing their own funding for that. I don't know that we would particularly be involved with a grant process for that, but I think we can have discussions with council if in the future about the financial commitment that council is making towards the parking structure.

Any other partnerships that could possibly be part of it? Will do.

John, don't discourage them if they want to give us money. Yes, Peter.

Yeah, we talked earlier today about the fun of spending someone else's money whenever possible. Mr. Dellinger.

I don't have any questions right now. I'll let you get through the whole presentation. This wasn't part of it. I'll wait until you get done with the whole thing. I have a lot of questions. Okay. And this is new information, so I need to process it in context of everything else. So I'll come back. All right.

Mr. Statton.

Yes. My first initial question was, there always an affordable housing element to this project.

The very first iteration of this project there was not. It was earlier than council was really focusing on affordable housing. When we came back to I think our third iteration, but the second one that we actually had a development agreement on, it was a much smaller project. It was a 24-unit project, and LMG had committed three units of that to be at 80%. Okay.

And we're referencing a follow-up question. When we're referencing AMI, are we using the Riley Carey?

Yes, sir. We don't have any other standard to use. We understand that council would like us to think differently about that, but because we need a common definition that everyone can use, that is what is being used here.

So what's being offered up is 80% and 60% of Riley Carey MSAs. Yes, sir. AMI. Yes, sir.

I have more questions.

I'll pass it. Okay. Mr. Singleton.

Just to clarify, I know we're supposed to make available 102 parking spaces. How many units, again, are we talking about? I cannot remember.

102, correct, Peter?

102 to match the number of spaces.

Yes, sir. One per.

I couldn't remember if that was the case or not. That's why I wanted to ask. And we talked about 10% at 80 AMI and 5% at 60% AMI. Okay. All right. Thank you. Yes, sir.

Mr. Matthews. No questions this time. OK, let's start back over. Mr. Bates. No further questions. Mr. Dellinger.

Are we at question time? No, sir. We do have more presentation. That was just seeing if there was any questions specifically about the housing mayor, if that's okay.

I do want to follow, since Gray mentioned the number of spaces. So how many spaces would be in the deck and how many are being provided? Like are the Main Street additions being counted towards the 102 space?

The 102 would be counting just ones in the new development, but we're counting the new ones that will be built on Main Street as providing enough overall parking to make the project viable.

Okay. And how many of the 102 are for the residents and how many are for the public? Okay.

So there's 134, Peter, Connor, do we have that correct? Yes. 134 total spaces. And LMG would be paying for a permit to use 102 of those, but they do not have to be specifically reserved, but available for that. So the difference there would be available to the public, but the other spaces, the spaces could be used by the public if there's not a need by a resident at that time. Yeah. I didn't understand that at all. Okay. So, Peter, can you share anything about your permit concept for your parking?

Rephrase the question, please. I'm sorry. I'm a little lost.

So, the initial question was for the, let's just talk about the DAC. Are those for the public or those for residents, or I guess the next part, or are they for both?

So the concept here is there for both. This is a public parking garage. And I think our advice is take care, do not reserve spaces for us, but reserve hunting licenses, essentially. And the reason you want to do that is since people come and go, you will have more capacity during the day and early evenings than you would have late at night. That's going to do you some good on the community center. At the same time, it will also help you with your Department of Insurance review and defending the fact that it is, in fact, a public garage. So what we're looking for with 102 units, most of which are studios and one bedrooms, We're not going to need a whole lot more parking than that. And we will never be 100% full. There will never be a day when every unit in this building is full. There will always be a couple available. So right around 100, 102 permits is what we're going to need. And those will be permits to come into the garage and look for a parking space. What we'll have to do together is carefully manage how much capacity you give out to others so that between the two were never over capacity. But, you know, the worst kept secret in the world is parking garages are just like airplane seats. They tend to be oversold a little bit because not everybody shows up every day. So we're working through that now on the management side, and I think that detail as we get through construction is going to be probably another conversation we're going to want to have together.

Yeah, because I'm still sort of struggling. Because I'm thinking if there's public access, does that, not impact the appeal of the units to know you don't have dedicated parking right next to where you live and i guess not my area of experience i'm not sure how this works in other places with regards to uh parking being available as an amenity which is really kind of what i i typically think of having a condo an apartment with a deck that the parking is an amenity but what we're saying is it's public but they're reserved but i'm i'm gonna let y'all continue and i'll try to follow up we understand your question okay okay so we got a little bit more and then we can come back around for general questions if that's okay mayor

So we discussed the timeline at the last time that we were together. So LMG has updated a timeline that we have here starting with month zero, which would be whenever we sign the MDA. There's about seven months worth of permitting, public hearing that will need to be done to transition the property, and some other steps. So it's about a seven-month process. project time for the pre-development. And then you see a construction timeline there of being a little over two years. So this is being provided just as in a response to the question that was asked when we were here in February. And this timeline will be a part of our MDA when we bring it back to you. And then I'll turn it over to Ms. Jones, who will summarize some of the materials that she provided in the packet for you about how we get to the closure of all of the steps that have to go into this.

Thank you, John. So as I outlined in the memo and what's in your agenda packet is really our summer legal intern helped to distill the some 70 pages of documents we have right now with not including the condominium documents into 15 pages of kinds of the terms and things. But the basic structure is The town, once the pre-development is through, and that's getting their financing, permitting, the site plan, all of that approved, is the town will subdivide the rec center parcel into two. So that corner will be subdivided off. That portion of the property will be conveyed to LMG by private sale. Now, this private sale, under the downtown development statutes and Council will have to have a public hearing before we can actually convey the property. Then once they own That portion of the property, they will then construct the parking garage. Once it's completed, the town will purchase the parking garage or deck as a condominium unit back with a capped price of $5.5 million. So that is less than what they anticipate the construction costs are. for the parking garage portion of the project to be. That keeps us in line with what a downtown development project can be under state law. It has to be where the private partner spends more than 51% of the total cost of the project. And then the town, along with the question that was asked earlier, the town will lease spaces in the parking garage to LMG for use by residential tenants. Now, these will be non-exclusive use, so it's not exclusive. like each studio or apartment unit will be assigned a spot there will be no assigned spots in this deck there um to answer somewhat of the amenity issue there may um and we're working through this we could have a structure where they each of the residents gets a parking permit so after the rec center closes in the evening there would be no more public parking and that would essentially guarantee those residential units a space for overnight parking. This also may prevent some problems other municipalities have with unhoused persons living in cars in parking decks. If we have a residential permitting system there is a way to control some of the nuisance activities that you see in some parking decks that occur. So, along with the lease of those units, LMG will handle the daily operation of the parking garage that's cleaning up trash in there, dealing with any potential parking disputes or issues. those kinds of issues, just your sort of day-to-day maintenance to make sure that the lights are operating in it, those kinds of things. But the town, as the owner of the parking structure, will be responsible for long-term maintenance and any large repairs of the parking garage that will be needed in the future. And the hope is that the lease amount that's being charged to LMG will help create that capital fund to be able to do, or at least contribute to that long-term maintenance or repair replacement issue that might come in the future. And the LMG folks can talk more about it, but I mean, this parking structure should last, what is it, like 50 years. So it can take some time to build up that reserve. for those kinds of issues. So that's that's the basic structure of the legal documents that will need to be executed to make this downtown development project actually work and in compliance with state law.

And so then the next action that we'll be asking council for, Ms. Jones and I were very optimistic recently when we updated you that in the pending agenda that Ms. Miller will cover later tonight, you'll see a placeholder for this being on the September 15th agenda. We believe that it will take us longer than that to finalize the documents and get them prepared for the agenda packet. So we're targeting the October 6th agenda now. And so whenever council does take action, we'd be asking you to adopt a resolution approving the master development agreement and authorize the manager to execute the agreement and other documents specifically referenced or reasonably necessary for the implementation of the agreement. And then as Ms. Jones mentioned, we would also be working to schedule the public hearing that will be required for the conveyance of the parcel to LMG. So that's what we have for you tonight. Mayor, we're happy to address any additional questions that council had and the LMG team is on as well.

Thank you, John. We definitely have time for some more questions. We also know that we don't have to make a decision tonight. There's nothing to be voted on. This was, in effect, a preview, giving us some good information. And there's plenty of time. to be asking individual questions, or one at a time or four at a time, of our staff, of our development partner, LNG. So let's take advantage of that over the next few weeks. Make sure we're addressing many of the issues that you brought up. They're very significant. With that being in mind, we'll take another round of questions. Let's start again with Mr. Vance and run down and see if we have some questions for our presenters here this evening.

I have no further questions.

Mr. Dellinger?

Yeah, so with regards to, there are no rezoning required for them to move forward, there is. And when will that be in the timeline?

I'm sorry, there is no rezoning required.

Okay, you are not, okay. Right. There was a paragraph in the lease agreement It said rent. Developers shall be responsible to the town for rent payments for the leased spaces and money annually at the start of each permit year. Town, in its sole discretion, reserves right to amend, alter, or change the rent provided. The new rent shall not exceed the parking rates charged to other parking users in the town, which I thought was interesting. But also, have we not specified what that rent is and what the schedule is? I didn't see any dollar figures.

So there will be a schedule that is in the master development agreement. Are you reading from Ms. Jones's document that's in your packet? Yes. So that is a summary. I'll let Ms. Jones provide additional commentary there.

So yes, an attachment to the master development agreement will be this lease agreement. It won't be executed until we know that there's delivery of, that the deck's occupiable for parking purposes. We're still working out what that market rate is, but that language, preserves the ability, should the town start charging for parking elsewhere in the town, the opportunity to make it at the same rates.

All right. I guess my question is, how much are we getting paid in rent for the...

So, Connor, do you have the revised lease schedule in front of you?

I can pull up the latest numbers, but I know that it's all still redlined from our end. on um you know waiting for your all's responses but in the first two years uh during lease up was agreed that there would be none and then you're starting in year three starts at twenty five dollars per permit obviously up to 102 so that's estimated to be about thirty thousand dollars a year and then from there it continues to escalate up um through year 50. Thank you.

Sorry, John. We still have to work the details out about the lease rate because anything longer than 10 years has to be treated like it's a sale of the property. So we have to make sure that we're getting a market rate for that. So there need to be some other parking studies done. The unfortunate thing for Garner is we don't have any other paid public parking right now. So we don't have an established rate for what we believe the market is in this area. So because we have to structure that lease to meet the state requirements that we are leasing the property at a market rate or to look at one of the exceptions for those kinds of arrangements. But it's treated like we're selling the property even though we're not selling the property.

So again, we'll have a final schedule that'll, that'll be in the, in the master development agreement. It's very similar to the way the schedule was structured in the original master development agreement that I know only part of the current council was a part of, but it was a similar schedule where we agreed the first few years during lease up, there would not be a payment and the lease payments would start in year three. Why is that? to provide an opportunity while not all the spaces are being used during lease up. So that was a structure that we had agreed upon in the original lease.

For three years, no payment? How long did it take? Two years.

The first payment starts in the third year.

I don't understand that. I mean, if we're putting in $5 million, why would we delay getting paid for the operation of the debt?

because we're also purchasing it back at less than it's going to cost to build. So we're getting a parking at a discount. This is part of, you can consider this two years part of the compensation and paying for the deck.

It's going to be hard for this to come back in two weeks because a lot of this is not in here and we're being asked for it to come back and vote on it. And I have another question too. What is the estimated annual maintenance cost for a parking deck?

Again, the town has not operated one, so we don't know our cost, but we have to determine that before we can finalize all these documents. That's part of the reason you're not getting a copy of this tonight. We have some work to do on some of the documents still.

Okay. Oh, that's fair. Okay. We just wanted to provide you an update on the structural parts that had progressed and make sure you had the update on the housing commitment because that was one of the big outstanding items.

And the last question I have is just the contribution that the town's making for the parking deck. And this is a question for LMG. Is that the only functional way the town can contribute to the capital stack to make the project work? Or is there a possibility for some cash and a zero interest loan?

We cannot do a zero interest loan.

or a market rate loan, slightly below market rate. I mean, I'm just trying to see, are there other ways we can still get this done that make the numbers work for you, or is this really the only way? Because they're just sort of a subsidy on top of the construction of the deck on our part for not having recouping rent for a few years. So is this the only structure that works for you all?

Well, I think before Peter answers that, I also mentioned that we ran similar questions with our partners at DFI. And I know Marcia Parrott was going to be on as well tonight, and I've not introduced her. But we did run through that. That was part of that due diligence work we've done. We ran a couple of different scenarios of how we could participate. And so there are some limitations on what we're able to do by statute to do that. Peter can still answer your question as you ask it of him, but there's some limitations even beyond what Peter's answer may be. that we have run through with DFI and we don't believe that there's another structure that would work. Peter, anything you'd like to add to that or Marcia?

I'll hold my tongue because I'd really rather Marcia answer because I'm just going to be making stuff up. She's actually done a scenario.

I'm here. Hi, Marcia Parrott with Development Finance Initiative. In terms of the structure, I'm afraid I'll kick it to Terry. I'm not an attorney, but I agree with John that having sat in on calls with lots of attorneys that this seems to be the viable structure for this project.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay. Mr. Stallings, any other questions?

Not so much a question, but a comment around affordable housing. I guess Me being fairly new to this project, and it's been going on for a while, I didn't know that there was an affordable housing element to the project. And whenever I see 80%, 60% at the Raleigh Cary MSA, I get concerned because I know a lot of what came out of the Affordable Housing Task Force work via done by Central Pines last year, listed out what affordable actually means for Garner. And when you see housing listed at 80 and 60 at Raleigh's, which is about $132,000 a year, which is not Garner's AMI. It puts a lot of people in categories that they actually don't exist in, like police officers, as they listed, like elementary school teachers. The only one that actually is above and can afford it is registered nurses, and that's it. Plumbers fall below it. Firefighters fall below it as well, too. When it comes to affordable housing, looking at what's actually affordable in this community, I think we need to have a broader conversation about is it 50, is it 45% of Riley Carey's MSA, rather than being at 80, which is even listed in the report is unaffordable for Garner at Riley Carey MSA. And that's just my only comment.

Mr. Mayor, if I may interject, I think doing the work on the Affordable Housing Task Force for two years, defining and giving definitions was a key component of that. And one of the outcomes from that was that in Garner, we were defining affordable as 50%, which again is a little different than broader. So again, that might reduce the number of units, but I think the real point is to make them accessible. We'd rather have fewer units that meet our definition So I just want to bring that point out that we had defined for Garner's purposes and wanted to clearly be articulating that to our developer and applicant friends that 50% of AMI was our local Garner definition of 50% of affordable housing.

Okay. We'll take those comments back, talk to the development team, and see if they have any thoughts on that.

Okay, if you're no more questions, and knowing that there are many more questions to be asked, and we do have some time, we need to bear down on these. Did we have another question, Mr. Singleton?

Yes, to clarify a couple things. 134 spaces, 102 to them. How many spaces are we adding on Main Street? Was it 18, 12, 18? I can't remember. 39.

38.

Add 38.

Yes, we're adding 38. On Main Street. On Main Street. From where the angle parking all the way up to Montague.

It'll go all the way, angle parking all the way to Montague.

Yes, sir.

38.

38.

So we'll be netting 38 and 34 spaces. So we'll be netting 72 spaces.

and the partial use of the other 102 at peak times when we may need it for rec center or retail use and not for overnight residential plus what's going on ran railroad back there yes correct which is 40 something right 48 48 so we're right about almost 120 120 over 120. okay and so in working with mr treisenberg and others when we were originally looking at this project we said look how real how realistic is this to do And with adding all of that parking, even with taking out the 102 part time, everyone's analysis is that we're viable to be able to support the retail and the other uses in the area. And then we just need to work out the sort of the uniqueness of the permitting of the 102 that we talked about earlier.

Okay, and just to speak about what Mr. Stallings and Mr. Dellinger touched on, because using Raleigh's AMI, 135 roughly, 80% of that's $81,000. That's higher than the Garner median income. Right. So that's why I think if they can switch to, if they won't go below 60, if they can switch to 10% to 60% and 5% to 80, that's at least an improvement. But again, it's still above the median Garner household income. Right.

And I'll let Peter or Connor speak to it if they'd like to. But one of the things that they have talked about with us before is sort of the naturally occurring affordability of the design of their product. So I know it doesn't completely address all of your comments that have been made tonight. But Connor, Peter, would you like to make any follow-up comments from the questions you heard about affordability and the way your projects are structured even before you made a commitment for the number of units?

I think that what, as I commented before, I'll stand by that, which is that this is truly what we do is try to design a certain type of unit and a size of unit so that our rents stay lower. That said, I want you to know that we're hearing you, and we will come back at the October meeting with specific numbers on the rents and specific numbers of units. I hear where you're going, and I empathize. We'll try to get there.

All right, thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, if no more questions, then we'll close that item out and move along to item number four.

Mr. Mayor, I just wanted to thank our guests. I know that Peter had a restriction on being able to travel with us tonight, so we had agreed for him to participate remotely, so I extended that same offer to Connor and Marcia, but I just wanted to thank them for being on remotely tonight. and thank them for all the work they've been doing. The DFI team has been great over the last few months working with us on bringing this back to you. So thank you to both of the teams for being on tonight.

Yes, thank you.

We're grateful for being able to do this over the phone. Thank you.

Excellent. Thank you, Peter and Connor. Great team to work with. Okay, moving along to item. Well, let's see. We usually take a brief recess at 730. I think we should do that now because we have at least 15-20 minutes worth of work. Let's be back at 735, please, and we will move ahead with the rest of our agenda at that time. Recess until 735. Thanks for your patience there. We have worked our way down to discussion item number three, the zoning text amendment request having to do with codification, reformat, and minor edits. And our planning director, Mr. Jeff Treisenberg, is going to step us through this issue. Mr. Treisenberg.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, council members. Before I dive into that, I did just want to call attention to a memo that I believe you got earlier, either this week or late last week, about the zoning text amendment pipeline. We do have quite a few things that will be coming and I just wanted to go ahead and highlight that real quickly for you so you kind of know what will be coming forward. Obviously, this recodification is very, very important and will certainly give us better means of managing everything that has to come after. But as you know, we do have a text amendment for funeral homes that is in the works currently. So that will actually be coming back to you very soon for a possible decision. then we have of course the codification and minor edits that I'm going to introduce to you tonight next month was just talking with mr. singleton during the break legislative action has been hot and heavy here over the last couple of months and so we are working on a package to bring forward to you at next month's work session to talk about some of the things that have been included in that legislation and how we will be looking to change and get our UDO into compliance and also to seek from you some ideas on how maybe we tweak the ordinance while still staying in compliance, but maybe we want to take some slightly different approaches to certain topics. But then after that We know that we have a list of requests that have been stated at different times by members of council and so we definitely have that on the horizon and we'll be reaching out to get more clarity on what other packages that council would like to see brought forward and then we do have some a couple of cases that are coming to us from specific entities outside from the public. We do have one from the billboard industry that is interested in talking to us about the possibility of electronic billboards. We even, I was just discussing with staff earlier yesterday actually, potentially another one regarding accessory dwelling units. That one is not on your list yet. We're still kind of talking with those folks about what that might look like. But then we also do have related to the the funeral homes, the issue of coming back and addressing crematoriums somehow. And then of course we also have our data center moratorium where we'll be coming back in the spring, most likely with recommendations about how to address that. And then, of course, when we finished up kind of our commercial batch or our residential, excuse me, batch of amendments related to the implementing the comprehensive plan, I did kind of throw out there a teaser that we would be definitely working on a batch of non-residential amendments. amendments aimed at better implementing Garner Forward. So again, just wanted to kind of put that together in a single document for you all so you could see what we are working on and kind of have going on in the background and hopefully kind of help lay a little bit of the framework for why this recodification is such an important piece for us to get accomplished.

Okay, and we have time for some questions or focus areas here, and it would be our turn to start with Mr. Matthews if there's questions or comments.

Not right now.

Mr. Samuelson?

No, I spoke with Mr. Treisenberg at the break about consideration about permitted zoning districts for data centers, and I'll send an email to him and copy everyone on that with just some thoughts.

Very helpful, a good way to proceed on a detailed issue of that nature. Thank you. Mr. Stallings.

No question.

Mr. Dellinger.

Are we just talking about this or are we talking about the whole thing? Just this right here. No questions on this.

Mr. Vance. No questions.

Okay.

Do you have some more for us?

Yes, I do. So without further ado, then I'll dig into a brief overview of the current request, which is for the codification reformat and minor edits to the UDO. And if you'll notice there, there's a preview of what's to come there with the little orange comma. That's been a favorite topic of discussion with the legal department. And so we've had a little bit of, tried to inject a little bit of humor into an otherwise dry subject. But the application is again coming from staff. This is zoning text amendment 2603 to fix codification errors, improve the overall readability, management of the actual source document, which currently exists in a number of Microsoft Word files, to employ consistent use of punctuation throughout the document and other minor edits. So, again, I'm just going to kind of highlight, group together kind of some of the 1400 plus 1500 whatever comments that you see in the PDF of the entire UDO. But the purpose is to, you know, codify the previous seven adopted amendment packages that we have had since we first adopted this version of the UDO. Into the overall ordinance so that way it's available in one document folks aren't having to look at what's Existing in the original and then try to compare amendment packages to the original language and figure out what's effective and It would also include any additional amendments that would be adopted prior to this package. So a good example of that would probably be the funeral home amendments. So as that package moves forward, if approved, we will roll that into this package as well. Generally, we're trying to accomplish a shift in the writing style to more of a legal format. There's not a specific legal format that's really published, but there are, as I have come to appreciate, some general standards that legal format professionals would prefer us to follow if at all possible. So one of those is to primarily when you're using serial kinds of phrases where you have three or more things that occur in a sentence and sometimes when reviewing the EDO you can get two or even three series of items that show up in a sentence. So I have encouraged my staff for us to embrace the use of the Oxford comma, which was not something that I was trained on in college, but I now have a new appreciation for. So it did help us kind of It was remarkable, I will say, because we had two people who, primarily on the consulting side, were drafting the original document. And it was honestly about a 50-50 split of when that comma was used and when it wasn't. And in some cases there were commas that were put in that separated something that was actually supposed to be together. So as you read through the comments in the document, you'll see there's a lot of commas added and a lot of commas removed. Just clearing up that use the punctuation to make sure that we are clearly conveying what items in the ordinance go together which ones are separated which ones are part of a larger list along with that we've reduced the use of the semicolon except in certain bulleted lists where it makes sense to use it as part of like completing a sentence structure where each one of those items is One thing that you take into consideration as part of the whole list and the last two items in the list will have an and behind it. Usually when you're supposed to consider everything in the list. And then for parenthetical type expressions, again, in most manuals of writing, you would use the comma to set off a parenthetical expression, but because we're using that more prevalently now with employing the Oxford comma, sometimes it just made more sense to set off those parenthetical expressions either with parentheses or with what they call the em dash, which is the the long dash. So again, it helps provide a little bit of a visual impact to say, hey, what's between this is really something that's adding clarity. Otherwise, it could be taken out, but you really want to still have it in there for clarity. So punctuation lesson for the day.

Can I ask? You certainly may. I have to ask the question. So we're in line one parentheses with the end dash, but the quotation marks in there are just a point that might tell us we're not going to be going around doing this all the time. Thank you. I want to make sure. Because I know that's supposedly not the thing to do anymore. And I was thinking to be sure they were on there just for pointing out these things. Thank you.

Yes.

But us older guys, can we get an English class refresher on all this?

I'M NOT CLAIMING THIS IS LIKE 100 PERFECT TO ENGLISH CLASS BUT JUST INQUIRING IT'S WHAT WE'RE IT'S WHAT IT'S WHAT THAT WE'RE AGREEING ON WITH THE LEGAL DEPARTMENT TO KIND OF SETTLE ON WE ARE GOING TO BE DEVELOPING OR WE ARE WE ACTUALLY HAVE STARTED DEVELOPING A STYLE GUIDE MANUAL SO THAT WHOEVER IS MAINTAINING THIS IN THE FUTURE WILL KIND OF HAVE THE RULES THAT WE'RE PUTTING IN PLACE FOR HOW TO AMEND IT GOING FORWARD

And if I may add, punctuation does have legal significance in some cases. Yes. Yes. I have brought him to my side. And I'll just say earlier we were editing I think this version of the UDO and I was putting commas in and Jeff was taking the commas out as we were sharing the document.

I'm glad y'all could work that out.

All right. So those are probably the two biggest purposes, but then there's a lot of other things that did show up at least a few times throughout the document. We did have some actual codification numbering errors in the document. Um, the most egregious was actually, um, in section 11.2 of the UDO. Um, when you get down in the original document, you'll find that it goes from like 11.2.3, um, and then goes back to like 11.4, but you're actually in the same section. So somewhere in there, because, um, this was not all in one document. It wasn't using. the software's capability to do automatic numbering correctly. And so somebody manually overrode that thinking that it was correct and nobody caught that error because there was no automation kind of backing it up in the background to give you the red flag. So there were several of those. A lot of them were occurring in smaller portions of the UDO where maybe somebody just missed a carriage return to start a new paragraph and start a new bulleted item. So there were just several examples of that that needed to be fixed and again those are, if you read the comments on the side you'll see we used wording like codification error fixed and tried to describe it for you so you knew exactly what we did. Along with that, there were some cross-references. And again, Article 11, which is the environmental floodplain stormwater chapter, there are a lot of cross-references to that chapter. So several of them, many of them were incorrect and needed to be fixed. So those have been addressed. We also talked early on with legal about the status of commentary and how to use commentary and should we be using commentary. And so what we did is we went in and we looked at the commentary. If it was truly just commentary, we've taken it out. But if there was anything that was of a directive and spoke about regulation, We took that language and incorporated it in. So you will see some cases of that throughout the document as well. Then, of course, this pops up primarily due to our residential package where we changed how we categorized different residential uses. For example, we no longer really use the term duplex. Duplex is actually now wrapped up into a slightly larger category called house-scaled multifamily dwellings. They can be a duplex. They can also be a triplex or quadplex. UP TO I BELIEVE IT'S 2,000 OR 2,500 SQUARE FEET OF FOOTPRINT. SO IN SOME PLACES WE JUST NEVER HAD IDENTIFIED THAT LANGUAGE TO BE UPDATED. SO THERE'S SEVERAL AREAS WHERE YOU WILL SEE THAT WE'VE REPLACED THE OUTDATED NAME OF THE USE AND INCORPORATED THE NEW NAME.

MR. TRIESENBERG, WOULD IT BE HELPFUL TO TALK ABOUT THAT RIGHT NOW OR WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO ALL THE WAY THROUGH? Either or. I have questions about that. Either or.

Council have a preference.

Yeah, it caught my, the change in the body of the document caught my eye and so I had to go back up and see that we actually had a definition for it. And it, how do I phrase my question? So you've got, under specific uses 644, right, and you've got these multi-scaled, multi-family, house-scaled multi-family dwelling units, duplex, triplex, and quadplex, defined as two to four dwelling units in a structure not exceeding 2,500 square foot, blah, blah. And then you've got a townhouse, which is a townhouse or a home-paired house defined as a single-family attached dwelling in which two to six units share common side walls. And then it goes on to actually talk about units are purchased on a fee-simple basis on small individual parcels of land, which is an interesting distinction because now we've got this overlap of townhomes with this multi-scale, multi-family. And I'm curious as to what impact that has on what comes before us with regards to rentals or large parcels that are not subdivided but sold. And then at the Planning Commission meeting for the 1010 Road Costco project, they had introduced a brand new term of townhome cottages. that doesn't exist in our UDO, but they defined it conveniently for their own project. And so I don't really have a specific question other than there seems to be some weird overlap between multi-scale, house-scale multi-family dwelling unit and townhomes, and there's some instances where multi-scale, house-scale multi-family is referenced, but townhomes are not. And so I was just wondering if there's work doing another pass through the document. So what do you do if you have a two to four unit multifamily, well, is that a townhome or is that a house-scale multifamily? And if you pick and choose one over the other, are there specific benefits or lack of benefits in doing that? So I think I just wanted to, since it was up here, kind of look and see where uh the overlap is and it's not because there are certain things for town homes and certain ones right and it it jumped out to me even more because of the this townhouse cottage concept that sure they they didn't even really know what that was either um so i'm trying to reconcile this new thing with what we have and you start to make these changes so i just elevate that to sort of go through the document again and check where those two things are mentioned in making sure, because right now there's not really the distinction other than the fee simple language. And I don't necessarily know what all the implications for that are, but it'd be helpful if you and staff could Kind of break that down and maybe look at past examples. This is an example of the house scale multifamily. These are townhomes. These are either or. And that kind of thing. That would be helpful. At least for me.

Sure.

Because we've also said...

we don't want any more town homes right so somebody's like well this is in the town home this is how scaled multifamily oh okay well i didn't say i didn't like that um anyway that's my comment slash question no that's that's a that's a great great comment um you know when we were going through the residential package earlier we kind of had our the previous way we broke it down had some of those same things and so we tried to make it a little clearer but i get why it's Still probably difficult to distinguish between the two, but you hit the nail on the head kind of with the parcel status, ownership status. That's really the crux of it. Anything that's multifamily is going to be on a single common lot. Everything else is on its own lot. But we'll go back. Yeah, definitely. That'll be a good exercise for us to do. All right. Thank you. Yep. Anything else off the cuff? OK. One of the primary edits that we made in talking with Ms. Jones, there was some language in the UDO about the legal department reviewing private HOA documents. She brought that up to me as something that was a hot topic of discussion amongst municipal attorneys and recommended that we kind of clarify that language that if there was going to be any review or you know if in some cases for us in planning it's important to know that they've at least drafted and are going to record those documents just to make it clear that Any of that kind of work would be done by us in the planning department, but that really review of their private covenants was not really something that we want to be involved in. So there are some minor edits that are addressed to that just to clear up what truly needs to be looked at and what does not.

Mr. Triesenberg. Yes. That caught my eye as well. And the other one in sort of relation to that is in section 1.4, interpretation. And the language says, short version, the planning director is responsible for the ultimate interpretation. but there's not a requirement that legal be a part of that process. And I'm wondering with the new legislative change that makes these decisions precedent setting, if that might be, language we want to include in that interpretation that the planning director in consultation with the legal department i just think because the repercussions are so sure potentially far-reaching it might be helpful to have that in writing not i'm sure you do that already yes but it'd be nice to have it writing you won't be here forever so you know one day yeah so that that it jumped out those two things the two legal All right, thank you.

Yeah, I felt like there was something in there that said that we at least provide a copy to it, but your point's well taken that that's kind of almost an afterthought and making it more of, because yeah, we do exactly that. Making it more consultative before we.

And codifying it, yeah. Exactly. Thank you.

The next bullet, again, kind of is somewhat similar to the codification errors or numbering errors. In some cases, the consultant, you use a title for the paragraph or the section and then follow it with a few sentences of introduction. And there were just some places where they failed to make that distinction and the title just ran right into the sentences that were to follow. So we've corrected that. We've also standardized the use of the terms article. So the article is all the chapters. Sections are the first layering of numbering underneath that. Subsections under that. So those will always be your headings that you'll see in blue in the document. And then everything else that files below that, like a... A1, A1A, those will just be referred to as paragraphs. We also standardized the naming and numbering of tables and figures, so we broke those down into two different items, and there were several that just didn't have a number and didn't have a title, so we gave them a number and a title, because many times they actually are cross-referenced, so it helped us make the cross-references more clear for the user as well. We also went back and verified when we were introducing acronyms and making sure that they were spelled out the first time. And in some cases, particularly in the definitions chapter, we included both, acknowledging that some people may go there first. There is a lot of... differences in what was capitalized in terms of proper nouns and the use of hyphens within words. So there were, we settled early on, or at least I thought we did, on certain things like non-residential would just be one word because we used it so often. So there were a few cases where the hyphen was still showing up between non and residential, so when you search for it, you wouldn't find it. So again, standardizing spelling and capitalization. There were several instances where there was just a missing word. Incomplete phrases and sentences. So again, using our interpretive authority, we kind of just said, hey, we really need to insert this word here to make this make sense. Again, some occasional edits to improve clarity and or readability. I recall there being one area where one word was used like three times in the same sentence. So we changed one of those to give it a little more clarity and not quite be so repetitive. We also went down and checked things like subject verb agreement, things plural versus singular, a lot of mismatches there, and other miscellaneous items. So I'd just like to wrap up by saying I'd like to give a special thanks to Cassidy Charles, our Planner 1 on Nick's side of the house. She was largely the person responsible for transferring the entire ordinance from multiple Microsoft Word files into one. It is doable. You can have 300 some odd pages in Word and it will not crash. Special thanks also to all my staff for identifying and submitting issues over the last three, four years. You can see it was a long list to cover. As I noted earlier, we are developing a style guide that will be very helpful, and we will also be maintaining a digital master copy with routine and current interpretive notes that will help us internally just keep track of day-to-day interpretations that are being made and how to apply the UDO. On each version, we're also applying a versioning number. So every time we adopt a new package, we're going to start at 4.0. Through Gartner's history, we've had three previous big versions of the UDO. So this one's going to be 4.0. And every time we adopt a new amendment package, it will become 4.1, 4.2. And we will post those on the website with their effective dates. That way, when folks are going back and they need to know which version of the UDO to my application, they can find it. So I recommended motion hopefully tonight is to direct staff to advertise a public hearing for September 15th and My parting comment is just that again. I don't want this It's a lot of work may seem at first blush like maybe it's not a whole lot of benefit, but I cannot underestimate just how much this will help everybody from y'all as elected officials to us as staff and to the general public and It's important for us, one of our core values that we've adopted in the planning department is reliability, and we are committed to being a reliable resource for the community, and this will help us find those answers to their questions efficiently, consistently, and you'll notice behind consistently is the Oxford comma, and accurately. And that's all I have for you tonight.

Man, I can't thank you enough for the work that you and your staff have done to bring consistency and accuracy. In some ways, it's mind-numbing for us, but I know you guys love it and get it right. But we do appreciate it. We do need to know the difference between a duplex and a whatever multi-family blah blah, you know. But we need to do that. We may not need to know exactly all the parts of the Congress Library decimal system that they use, but we really appreciate what you're doing. Let us know when we need to take a tutorial to get in step with the modern age and the correct terminology. Having said that, thank you. Let us know what we need to do. We'll see it again for actual implementation, I think. And in the meantime, don't hesitate to ask the questions that were being asked now. How do we learn to replace the word duplex with a word that's even more accurate these days? And how do we help you implement these changes? Are there any other questions or comments from council members on this item?

I would just like to say to the staff, I tell you, this is a lot of work to do to go sentence by sentence to make sure everything is falling into place. And my hat's off to you. Yes, it's really a lot of work to make the definition. I'm smiling to myself when I'm thinking about a time when a person was arguing what does is mean in this particular context. So it's like, wow. So now we're looking at this and the details that we're looking at. And again, such a tremendous amount of effort and time that goes into this. And you're appreciated for the efforts that you put forth.

Yes, indeed.

Yeah, I just want to commend you all for making the effort and time to do it all at once rather than sort of piecemeal. I found it over here. That takes a lot of time away from other things, but a lot of focus and a lot of folks working. And it's good to do it now when all this is coming at you so you're not contradicting and you know it's clean. So we appreciate all that hard work you guys have done to get it. tidy, the tidiest version possible as we start making these changes. So thank you.

Thank you for your hard work. This is our UDO. We got to make sure that we have it right. This is the document that when people come in and they want to develop things, they're going to go to first. I mean, as we were talking about during the break, we have advisory documents, but this is primary governing document when it comes to development so we definitely have to make sure that it's right so thank you for your hard work like councilman vance said it's pretty um it's a lot that goes into it line by line but it seems like we're on the right track so thank you

Some of the screens you showed us, I was having a flashback to senior high or junior high English, when how to do this and how to do that, and the teacher would do it on the overhead screen or overhead projector. Some of you young folks don't know what that was. But anyway, we didn't have these, and I know they will write it out, but I know you want it to be correct, and that's what you're doing is while you're updating some of the language. correcting all the punctuation based off the fact that the attorney has stated that some of this stuff is important for legal documentation. So thank you all for doing this.

Thank you for all the hard work. Now you guys need to come up with a software program that would automatically insert a lot of this. Turn that over to engineering. They could probably help.

Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. And that moves us along to item E on our agenda, which is updates to council. And item number one is manager report. Ms. Miller.

Yes, good evening, Mayor and members of council. Our first item under manager reports this evening is your monthly development activity map update. And Mr. Triesenberg's gonna stay at the podium and review what's been added to the activity map. So Mr. Triesenberg.

Yes, all right. and we have three items again these are all site plans so all being reviewed and potentially approved at the administrative level for compliance with the udo so the first one we have is entitled the cap redevelopment cap stands for capital area preservation capital area preservation is working with The owners of, and I'm gonna forget the proper name of the house, but Auburn Nightdale Road in the old Auburn community adjacent to the railroad tracks. So it was that historic house that sat just off from the old driving range. There is a developer who is looking at converting that to non-residential use. The process for doing that will be heavily influenced by preservation rules, because it is on the National Register, and so they are working with the State Historic Preservation Office to make sure that they will be complying with all of their rules and then we will be applying applicable portions of our UDO and also with the building code trying to marry those two things together. because it is a historic property they do have the right to certain exemptions primarily within the building code but it even it even kind of goes to even how you design your sidewalks how you design the edge of the pavement the preference there from the preservation side of course is to keep more of that rural look, whereas we tend to try to upgrade things to more of an urban standard. So there will be some compromises probably in give and take in that. But ultimately, their goal is to keep it on the historic register and to do the upfit according to their guidelines. You said non-residential use? Correct. Yeah, most likely some kind of office use. All right, the second project is the Morrison Associates warehouse expansion. So I'm sure most of you are very well aware of the new office building that Morrison Associates has been building on their property. here on Morris Drive and 70. They are now coming back with a warehouse expansion on their existing parcel. This will load. There we go. Looking at an extension here in the back, it will be something that's not particularly visible from Highway 70, but they are removing some of their outdoor maneuverability space, I guess, for loading and unloading and actually bringing more of it in-house under the roof structure. So again, it will be reviewed by staff to meet all requirements applicable in this case from the UDO. And then lastly, a town-sponsored project, the Peacock Dam breach. Not really a lot to show on that, but we will be breaching the dam and reestablishing the flow of water and seeing where that goes to. So primarily just a small grading exercise, but that is currently in review by staff as well. Happy to answer any questions if you have them.

Question on the dam breach. After it's breached, what sort of the protocol for observing the impacts of that downstream and for the site itself?

Sure. I'm going to ask Leah to come up and address that one.

Good evening. So we have before we started the design of the breach, we did do modeling to look at the impacts downstream. It's a unique situation out there because the streams have basically routed themselves around the area that the dam is impounding at this point. So other than the impact of the water directly being drawn down from the breach of the dam itself, There will be very little change in the amount of water being sent directly downstream because most water is bypassing the dam and the impoundment area at this time anyway. And so we'll just have to make sure that it's drawn down slowly enough to not increase levels downstream dramatically. But after the fact, that won't change a whole lot. Similar to what we had at the Meadowbrook Park Dam, once it's breached, we'll have to have a drying period time to see what pops up, right? So usually you have some development of wetlands and things like that. We'll have those delineated so that we know what area is usable and is protected to see what evolves there.

So the rerouting, rerouted streams, you anticipate them to continue to naturally be rerouted and this is just going to be a new sort of flow?

Probably yeah so for the for the most part what the what the impound area of the dam is holding is just runoff from adjacent areas when you have rain what flows directly into that there's not a direct stream flow that's that's being damned by that structure at this point. So it's not it's it's a much less significant amount of water than there used to be impounded behind them.

Thank you. So there are not any perennial streams, any natural flowing streams going to that location now?

They're directly adjacent to it, but they're not flowing directly through that, through the pond the dam is creating. So it's not in line with the streams.

Thank you.

All right, if there are no other questions, thank you, Mr. Treisenberg. Next item under manager reports is the pending agenda for your September meetings. As always, council, I'll remind you that we've penciled in items for your September meetings, but it's a work in progress. And so some things may move around. There's a few things we've even talked about this evening that may move around based on what was included in your agenda, a packet. But looking ahead to September 1st, your first meeting in September, several items under consent, including voluntary annexation hearing for 1306 Creech Road Homes. Also your minutes are coming back from your July meeting and then the second vote on both chapter 11 ordinance and chapter 18 ordinance will also be coming back as part of your consent agenda. Under public hearings we have a voluntary annexation for Timber Thompson commercial. We'll also be bringing back for the public hearing the fire protection ordinance amendments that were discussed previously. as well as the traffic control ordinance amendments as well. In addition to that, as requested under new old business for your meeting on September 1st, the delegation of authority item that Attorney Jones has been working on will come back for council as well. Looking ahead to your second meeting in September, September 15th, we have several items under consent agenda right now. The first one is the funding agreement contract with the county. for the grant that we are receiving for the housing plan that you've learned more about when we provided our proposal update in July. We also have some budget amendments coming back as we finalize the budgets for the Rand Mill Road improvement projects as well as the White Deer improvement project, specifically the splash pad project. Under public hearings, we have a Tier 2 conditional rezoning for Senncar Properties zoning amendment, Enclave at Meadowbrook, a Tier 2 conditional rezoning request for Tharrington Road. We heard a little bit about that earlier today during your special meeting with GDC. And then we'll be having the hearing on the reformatting minor edits and codification updates that Mr. Triesenberg just walked you through in terms of the UDO. Looking under new and old business, there's a tier one conditional rezoning request for 7615 1010 Road. Also coming back to you, zoning text amendment for funeral homes and neighborhood mixed use district. The downtown opportunity site master plan Development agreement we had targeted 15th, but as mr. Hodges mentioned we're going to be moving that to your first meeting in October Also, we are still working on the Benson utility extension agreement and interlocal agreement So we're hoping to be able to bring that back to you at your September 15th meeting and then also coming to you for update is the Meadowbrook Park master plan update for continued discussion And then you'll have your normal Talk of the Town reports under Manager Reports. Your final meeting, your work session, is scheduled for September 29th. You will have your development previews scheduled before. Mr. Triesenberg and his team will be bringing back more updates regarding legislative compliance And then council had requested based on feedback and discussion on policy objectives and priorities and some strategic planning work that we're doing, coming back and having a discussion about prioritizing council requests and determining priorities for the fall. So we'll be coming back with that discussion as well for council to give some feedback and direction. And then we have our standard reports during the work session as well. development activity map as well as your october pending reports so that's what we have now as always things could move around or change a little bit as we continue to develop the agendas for september but wanted to give council a heads up of the things that we anticipate happy to answer any questions that council may have okay any any questions

I have a question or a comment speaking on the council policy objectives and kind of just for public transparency and then kind of process that coming to council over the course of doing the budget and the conversations on policy in the spring. Council was provided on July 19th with sort of a distillation of some of these policy ideas for feedback. And we reviewed those with the town manager and town attorney on August 5th. And I want to say to the town manager and town attorney, a lot of the stuff is happening and ongoing and in process so uh we're really excited about that and so just kind of again awareness for the public that around the there are three main domains for some of these policy objectives one is affordable housing the other is fiscal stewardship and the other is development On affordable housing, we're looking at the funding model that we want to implement at some point in the future, near future, if housing, affordable housing advisory board is still ongoing and that works continued. Also look at the impacts of the 21st Century Road and Housing Act and the implications it may have on our UDO, so we're already having those conversations. On the fiscal stewardship side, seeing what the threshold is for items to come as new and old business versus consent agenda. And then work that has been going for a while, fiscal impacts of projects and revenue modeling. Blue Ridge loophole comes up all the time, still on our radar, and staff is working on, you know, finding ways to mitigate that. We've had a lot of success working with applicants and developers so far working with legal to get some compliance with that. And on the budget side, work and conversation is ongoing with creating a standalone CIP document over the next couple of years to give the public and council better insight and clarity on our scope of need. And then on the budget side, working with staff to have council participation sometime in the fall, early in the budget cycle, so that we can have conversations around last year's closeout and the upcoming year. And then kind of, Mr. Triesenberg was up here talking about this, all these incorporations of UDO changes. And then lastly, working on Tier 1 and Tier 2 conditional rezonings and ways that we can address those in a formal way, but also in an informal way to make sure our development partners understand their options when they're coming to council. So I just wanted to let that know that we're talking about it in September, but there's a lot of work that's already happened, which is good, and we're making really good progress, so thank you very much.

welcome in and to your point mr. Dellinger yes although we're talking about how we're organizing prioritizing some of these tops at topics a lot of this work is happening now where we're planning towards it so we want to make sure we don't lose the momentum and energy around a lot of the the work and priorities council has established I'm happy to answer any additional questions you have a question that is everything for the manager reports this evening

Okay, and I believe that brings us to the attorney reports.

No report this evening.

Which brings us along to the council reports. Let's start with Mr. Vance. Any council report items?

No report.

Mr. Dellinger?

Just two items. I had a question for Mr. Assistant Manager Poole on the AI timeline and how that work is going.

So we're in a final draft of our AI guidebook. We work with our strategic initiatives department, our legal department, and our AI task force. So we have a final document. We have a couple of decision points to present to the HR director and the manager for just some direction on generative AI platforms and those things, but the skeleton of the manual and guidelines are done, and we're hoping to have the draft document completed and said,

Is the plan to bring that draft to council for feedback?

We can do that.

I would like to, just again for clarity of public transparency. The only other comment was, I think we had a really good meeting with GDC this afternoon, a lot of really good conversation. It's really great to talk directly with the board members and see that there's a lot more common ground than has appeared in the past several months. So I think we made really good progress. I think it was really great too There's sort of an enthusiasm for grant seeking and seeing what we can do at GDC to sort of take it to the next level as it's evolved over the years. So it was a really good meeting this afternoon. Really good meeting.

Thank you. Mr. Talens?

No report tonight.

Mr. Singleton? Yes, sir. Mr. Matthews? Nothing. And that brings us along to the question of a closed session, but it looks like perhaps that need has been filled.

That's correct. There's no need for a closed session tonight.

Okay. Excellent. Well, that covers the agenda items this evening. If there's nothing else we need to discuss, I will accept a motion to adjourn.

So moved.

Second. A motion by Mr. Stallins, second by Mr. Vance. All in favor of adjourn, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed by name? We are adjourned. Another good evening's work. Thank you all. Thank you all.