Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

This conference will now be recorded. Lord be with us tonight uh to discuss these important matters of Cersa Beach. Uh look over the planning commission and the discussions and business items we have tonight. Uh look forward to uh the presentation fire captain is given tonight uh to better our town. Uh and we also welcome and hope you look over uh Mark our new director uh as we better over the next few years. Amen. The pledge of allegiance. I

pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Next item will be um agenda approval. Get a motion to approve agenda tonight. Motion to approve the I got a motion to approve. Can I get a second? I believe we need to make a motion to the agenda to add

the business item was already added. He just ended up putting it as attachment. It's been properly posted and everything. So, it will not be added um unless you need to do that. It has been publicly noticed. It was just on an additional exhibit for the town. I think one of the parts Just a reminder, please move your mics down so we can hear you in the recordings like this. Yes. Is there any other amendments?

Motion everyone for an agenda tonight. Say I I anybody uh next item is minutes approval from uh June 19th and August 5th. We can do these separately if anyone has edits or we can do them together if uh everyone has agree. Um the June 19th uh was a meeting that ended up not getting video I think video was not working uh and then we didn't have a director at that time and they did take minutes that I did utilize to capture those minutes. So hopefully you review them. They look pretty we have any changes have a motion. Um, somebody can make a motion for both of them or single them out.

Make a motion to approve the uh minutes of both June 19th and August 5th, 2020 2025. All right. Got a motion to approve both minutes from June 19th and August 5th. Do I have a second? I'll second that. All right. And uh that's opened up for discussion, Mr. Chair. Yes, ma'am. I think on the June 19th it didn't say that I attended and I was not it was in fact not there but it also does not say I was absent but I would I think I had an excused absence. Is that right? It just doesn't

not for sure. Um so you're looking to be absent on J19. Well, I don't know what the if we put I mean if someone is absent, is there a difference between excused and not excused or No, I think our bylaws just specifies the reason we're absent and absent, Mr. Chair. Yes, ma'am. So, in our bylaws though, doesn't it say that if we have three unexcused absences, so how are we tracking those if we're not doing three consecutive absences, I believe. And I I mean, we want to put you in absence. So, are you asking if we should

I'm just wondering if we differentiate since we So, we don't I'm not. It's okay. Are you asking as far as excused or unexcused? Yeah. Or do we differentiate? I I don't I don't know if he specified the bylaws. I don't Okay. I think it just states that if you're absent and through accepted meetings, it could have to do. Okay. We can put it however we want. Okay. So, we'll add uh Melody on June 19th. Any other edits?

U I I did not attend. Um did you attend? It's the reason I'm asking it says Larry absent. No, I I was here. Okay. So, that should be maybe Okay. You were the opposite one, right? Which I see. Yeah. Larry was here and then it's slashabsent. That should be a period too.

All right. We'll make that modification for a period after Larry and then absent Scott. Any other edits? Right. Uh we'll move on. Um everyone agree say I. I. Anyone opposed say no. All right. Minutes for both dates are passed with those edits. I think a period after Larry on roll call for 619 and then LMD absent as well. Uh, next item is public comments on agenda items. We have no public comments. Uh, so we'll move on to director's report tonight. Like to welcome director Bier tonight. Um, and we have an intro question and answers and he will provide us a period report today. I believe he's prepared so far. Um, so again, welcome. I know I've met with the director. Uh, I think I think they had a meeting. I think a few commissioners have met with him. Uh, I've also met with him a little bit. Really interested in the work that he's doing for the town. Um, um, so I'll let him take the floor. Give it to you.

Thank you, Dusty. Um, members of the commission, um, everybody always asks how they pronounce my last name. I'm going to make it real simple for you. It's Broder. If you try to pronounce it like my grandmother from France, she'd say Bro, but let's dispense with that. It's just Kroger. Um well, thank you. I' I'd like to present um a multiple bullet pointed u for you today. Some of it's redundant. Some of you know this stuff already. Um but I like keeping a record for myself as as we progress along. Um, so, uh, some of it has to do with staff, some of it has to do with some of the projects that we're that you're all working on and some of it has on some of my first impressions. Um, I'm new eyes here, right? So, whenever a new director comes in, he sees things and finds and tries to find out how things happen, why things happen, uh, what's working, what's not working, those sorts of things. So, uh, in that spirit, um, I'll present these sort of in a formal basis, but, um, I will be glad to take any of your questions as we get to the end of it. Uh, okay. Starting out, uh, Brad Anderson is three weeks into his duties and safeguards building official services are no longer needed unless requested. Safe Builts Engineering continues to be utilized as an asset performing storm water plan reviews. Currently, um their backlog is approximately 3 weeks. So, anything going into safe bill is taking about 3 weeks to approve. Broer began his duties with the town on Monday, August 11th, and is familiarizing himself with local codes and ordinances. Uh there was a meet and

greet held on Wednesday, August 13th. uh code enforcement officer job description has been approved by the town council and advertised. Director Broer has extended an offer of employment to an individual who is expected to start in the third week of September. And I will tell you, I'm very excited to get an experienced code enforcement officer on board. The gentleman is from Pennsylvania. He's moving his entire family down here. They've been vacationing here for years. He knows the area, loves the area. Um, so I'm really excited to get uh that individual on board. Uh, the fire marshall's office, as you know, is assisting with code enforcement issues uh until until the replacement is on board full-time. We'll probably have a little bit of a transition period there where uh fire and code enforcement are working hand and glove until the he's ready to step into the breach, if you will. Uh doing code enforcement on Dr. Bro is reviewing the planning commission meetings. I've done that. I've looked at your minutes previous meetings. understand the issues surrounding tree preservation design and the development of a concise capital improvement pro investment program. Uh director bro continuing uh is exploring continuing education opportunities for the members of the planning commission to fulfill their annual requirement and try to find courses that will actually are related to what you do. Um, you know, it I I don't want you working on something like uh becoming experts in storm water, you know, retention and things like that. That's that's more technical. I'm looking for I call them nuts and bolts videos that you can watch at your leisure. Um, and we can decide whether we want to do that as a group or whether you'd like to do that one on on your own um at your home computer. Uh

but I am looking for courses that relate to what you do here on a monthly basis. Okay. Broer has conducted a cursory review of the tree preservation ordinance and upon first impression feels that simplifying the chapter would make it easier for property owners and small builders to comply voluntarily uh which ultimately makes enforcement less of an issue. He also believes that some of the contents of the ordinance should not be residing in chapter 17 zoning. Um I've been a zoning ordinance. I've been a planner for over 45 years. Uh there are elements of that that belong probably in another part of the code or perhaps even a new part of the code. Uh and we can we can talk about that talk about that this evening. Uh your brother is encouraged by some of the private investments the town is receiving through changes in ownership as part of the design overlay district. We encouraged by some of the the new owners that we're getting and their willingness to make improvements to their property. Uh they understand that the front of their building and their parking lot is they're welcome back and they're all they're all in and wanted to make those improvements. Uh so I'm really encouraged by that. Uh in the future I plan to bring all proposed public projects to the commission for findings of consistency with the comprehensive plan. Uh the director uh this is just sort of a for your information. Uh have some dates when I'll be away from the office for personal family matters. Uh these dates include September 19th and 22nd and in October I will be away from the office from October 8th through the 17th. We're currently investigating an online zoning portal which will allow residents and builders to apply for permits using

their computer and other handheld devices. A key feature will enable residents to view the projects being approved in real time. One of the things that I think is imperative for our planning department is be as transparent as possible. And I know that there are a number of people in the community who kind of I say keep an eye on things a lot. And I think one of the ways we satisfy their need to know what's going on is having a zoning portal that shows every permit that's coming through, what is be what's being requested, and whether it's been approved, denied, or conditionally approved. And I think that will make a huge difference uh in the office's transparency. There are currently no subdivisions, zone change requests, or plan developments submitted to the office during the period that I've been here. And there have been no appeals of the development administrator development administrator's decision during this period. Probably too short a period of the decisions I made. But I wanted to let you know that um I don't know how much you all know about my history, my past and but I'll I'll try to summarize it as quickly as possible. I've been a professional planner for 45 years. I've worked in five different states and I've worked in over 13 different communities. Basic one, I was working for the council of governments, Charleston County, the Berkeley, Charleston, Dorchester Council of Governments. Prior to that, I was the planning and zoning director for the city of Peaks Creek. Prior to that, I was the planning and econ I was the community and economic development director for Pacific Grove, California. And if you're all wondering where Pacific Grove is, if you know where um

Mterrey, California is, uh it was their next door neighbor. It was a comm small community of only 13,000 population and we had over 185 structures on the National Register of Historic Places. It is literally the cutest story book community you've ever seen. Um to our south was the city of Carmel. If you all know about Clint Eastwood, you know that he was the mayor of Carmel. And Carmel is the same. Carmel has an enormous number of historic structures. And they have probably one of the strictest tree ordinance, tree preservation ordinances that I've ever seen uh in my travels. So, um any of you are golfers, you know that Pebble Beach uh sits between Carmel and Pacific Grove. I'm not a golfer. Uh I spent five years there and never went out on the links and tried to golf there. But uh really really a pretty place. And finally, just to round out some of the experience I had, I was the ex assistant executive director of community development for the city of San Antonio, the eighth largest city in the United States. And I was there for a number of years and never really got my hands around that city. It was just so big and so diverse. It was really hard as a individual to sort of get your hands around that community. Um I often tell people this story that if you are if you're curious about how big the community is. I can describe it this way. If you're traveling on I 10, which is the interstate that goes from coast, basically coast to coast, and you enter it on the east side, and you're traveling at 70 miles an hour, it takes you 45 minutes to exit the city of San Antonio. So that gives you an idea of just how long and how big the community is. Uh so, uh I processed the first

zoning permit for Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream in Burlington, Vermont when they opened up their first ice cream shop in a And they had a wooden tub in the middle of the floor where the where the rollup doors were, where the bays were. Floors were all stained with oil. They had a wooden tub with a little electric motor spinning cream in the middle of the floor. And I remember going back and telling the director of planning, I was the assistant director at the time. I said, "I don't know how these guys are ever going to make it, but they're never going to make it. You're never going to make it in the ice cream world." Well, as it turns out, one of the most successful ice cream screams in the middle of the show. Uh, that's just a little bit about my background. Um, I also spent a number of years um, running my own company. I ran my own company for 13 years and were profitable for 12 of the 13 years. First year was not so great. U, but I know what it takes to run a business. I know what it takes to make paychecks and I know you know handling people and handling money and keeping an office afloat. So while I have a lot of public sector experience, I also have a lot of private consulting experience. So I have a balance of about 20 years in the private world and 25 years in the public with a sort of a crosspollination of those two. answer any questions that any of you I've met with some of you uh individually in my office, so you know a little bit more about me than what I've just outlined. Uh but I'd be glad to answer questions that you have or thank you for that. Any questions?

Glad you're here. So first thank you director bro look forward to working with you. I think we probably met with a few folks have expressed a variety of uh interest, questions, concerns about the role, your you being in the role and the like. And

I'll pile on for what it's worth. Uh we've suffered uh a good deal of self-inflicted wounds as a town and they usually all stem from either uh loose interpretation of ordinances, false interpretation, latent disregard, you name it, right? But there's been all all types of things and you know but then this body or me and would ask questions get kind of half responses back and sometimes doubling down on an error digging in the heels other times stories would change and shift and it's got to point where so much stuff that we worked on whether it be design overlay on the big shop stuff it's just like if I actually read the ordinances or they were followed from the get-go like we wouldn't have found oursel all knotted up in so many of these things.

So, and a question that's out there and I'm not going to put you on the spot expecting an answer, but just being transparent, a thought in my head is how does someone in your seat handle a conflict of direction you're giving that doesn't align with what the ordinances say, whether or not the ordinance are right or wrong. And clearly we've got tons of room for improvement there. But it just seems like it's an area where you can get called or pulled in two different directions with hey, you know, someone else said this and you know, I'm involved and I know whether it be my boss or just the the current the political current saying do this, but

in writing here it says I should be doing this. So hopefully and and I'm going and glass half full for sure, you know, as we work in this together in the relationship that uh we can lessen the amount of pain and time spent on items just by you know upfront either working together or following the ordinances or saying right listen ordinance isn't going to work out. Let's let's put this on short track to get it changed for these reasons. So that was a whole lot of me pontificating and not so much a question, but that that was just where I'm at with the excitement of working together and also my, you know, little bit of cautiousness.

Alex, I'm glad I'm glad you did that and and let me tell you why. Um, I have written co codes from stem to stern, you know, literally entire zoning codes. And I would tell you there's an art and science to writing code. And about me is that I will always tell the planning commission what I call the unvarnished truth. And the unvarnished truth is is that you have a zoning code that I can identify at least 17 different authors have worked on this code and I have been called everything from the planning director to the director of planning direct planning to the development director to the zoning administrator and I think two more that I can can't think of off the top of my head right now. So, we're working with a bit of a flawed piece of legislation here. Um, and I can find things in the ordinance that contradict other portions of the ordinance which make interpretation just a whole lot of fun. Um so I do however is when I find that I'm conflicted by interpretation should be one of the things that I will do with your permission is I will come to you during my director's report and I will tell you what that conflict is and I will seek your counsel on what that conflict is and I may not take your advice but I'm going to bring it to you so that we can hash it out so that we come out with a reasonable answer. One of the things that I believe about enforcing a zoning ordinance is that zoning ordinance has to be has to be enforced with a great deal of common sense. And a lot of times

ordinances aren't written with a lot of common sense ingrained in them. And the reason they should be written with common sense is because had it drummed into my head by town attorneys for years was you never write an ordinance you can't enforce. If there's portions of the ordinance you can't enforce and you need to take them out of the ordinance or rewrite them so that they can be enforced. So when I ever I run into that, I will come to this body and I'll say, "Hey, look, you know this ordinance that we've got here, I've got an applicant that wants to do this and they're meeting the purpose or the spirit and the intent of the ordinance, but if you read section 7 a2, you'll see that the language there really doesn't support the purpose and intent of what this person's trying to do. So with your permission, I will bring those to you and you and I will talk about those openly u so that we can arrive at a a mutually agreeable decision on how we move forward. And I will do that a lot. And I I can tell you I'm going to do it probably more than I've done it in the past because the the zoning ordinance that you have here has been written by so many different authors that conflict and is bound to occur. And I' and I've already I've only been here three weeks and I've already found two or three places where it does that. It's it's going to be a little messy. It's a little messy at first. uh but I think interpreting this in the past. What do you feel is the correct interpretation? Do you feel that the applicants if you will crisis is worth looking at

the ordinance made a change in the ordinance or do we have to you know or what do you think we ought to do? So that's kind of the way I operate and the way I operate is always from a degree of common sense. If I feel that I read something and it doesn't make sense to me, somebody who's written I've written like eight zombie codes. If it doesn't make sense to me, what do you think it's doing to the people out there in the public who are trying to read this thing and make sense of it? What do you what are you all faced with when you try reading these things? Um, you know, just the a couple of the items that you have on the agenda tonight. I've sat and read those ordinances and um I'm not entirely happy with that. I'm just going to be honest with y'all. Um there's there's some work that needs to be done and uh hopefully um together we can we can get through these things so that we can make these ordinances easily understandable by an eighth grader. That's what I've always been told. How you write legislation for zoning, it has to be understood by an eighth grader. There's portions of this ordinances that might be understood by somebody with a law degree, but not understandable by the landscaping crew or the contractor or the small business or the small builder. Now, they they've got to be able to understand this. And if they and here's the here's the secret. If they don't understand it, they're going to ignore it. They're going to ignore it and they're going to do what they want to do anyway. And that's when everybody gets in trouble. I've already been called out on one where we have a swimming pool in town that's filled with water with no fence around today. So the contractor went out and put out one of those orange like tape things. That's not going to stop an 8-year-old kid from getting in the pool and drowning. So yeah, I've got real life safety issues that I have to deal with

almost on a daily basis and I have to make a call. No one's going to die on my watch in this town. Let me tell you that. So, uh, it's common sense, right? If a pool is supposed to have a fence and it's filled with water, what am I missing here about a fence being put up around that pool, right? So, I will bring those types of things to you and I and I hope we have lots of robust conversations about, you know, how we how we parse this ordinance out, what makes sense, what's doable and what's not doable.

Thanks for the ultra detailed response. I'm glad you're not going to let anybody die under watch. Present company includ any other questions. So go ahead, ladies and gentlemen. Carol, I'm not saying I'm majority. You know what I mean? I can't not say anything.

Don't uh I echo uh what uh Alex has said and I loved your response uh to it. I am one of those crazy lawyers and I'll tell you I can't make heads or tails of a lot of our ordinances and I have sat here for a few months. I'm new to the commission and I keep saying this doesn't make any sense to me. uh we need to you know to fix these uh things and simplicity is

it is absolutely key unless it is a complicated topic and then maybe you get into a little bit more detail. Yeah,

I'm thrilled with the idea of an online portal. I find one of the things that we are really lacking in search is historic data collected uh together. Um we have been talking for a number of months about various ordinances that um um sanction non-conforming uses. Something that I really don't like at all. Um, but we don't have any mechanism, as far as I know, to keep track of all of these non-conforming uses. Uh, I think in in just my few months here, we've talked about like four different types of ordinances where we are allowing non-conforming uses that that we've just been dealing with this year. And I I'm gonna bet that there is no recordkeeping of who uh or which property

who has it legal,

you know, who has that legal entitlement to uh the status of a non-conforming use or a grandfathering or what have you that we just don't know. And um perhaps uh this portal idea could bring together all of these concepts. Another thing that uh Dusty has tried to um uh get us working on is a um uh a vacancy registry for uh uh properties that could be uh uh occupied by businesses and what have you. But we don't know who all the business owner the not the business owners. We know we don't know the property owners. They're not all collected. They're not here necessarily. They're not local folks. Uh but we don't have a collected set of data that tells us who they are. So we could say, "Hey, we just adopted a vacancy u registration. you better let us know whether your property is uh vacant and keep us surprised uh as things uh go. So I I just think creating anything that allows us to assemble data that is useful for uh operating this town and having people feel like they are um treated in similar fashion is so critical and I think that would go a long way to uh doing that. So I'll stop now. But

one of the things that one of the things that that Porter will do is it will open everyone's eyes to exactly how I mean point of clarification for y'all. When I came here I thought but two square mile town that can't be oh my gosh. Holy mother. Um, you have a lot of very uh active non-commission code enforcement officers in your town who email me daily with all sorts of things. Uh, and I think, God, wouldn't it be great is that every time we approve a permit, sometimes there's a lag of approving the permit before and sometimes a lag of two years before they get their financing together, before they go out and do it, before they start cutting trees. And the first sign of of trouble is cutting trees because that's the first step. They're going to clear what they call clearing grub a. That's the first thing that every developer does. And now if somebody loss in a call to Angie and goes, "What's going on on 17th Street?" And unless it's like right under our nose at the moment, how do we how do I know what was approved by your previous director two years ago? So having that history, that log of just development happening will do that. And also it will cut down greatly on your foyer requests because people just want information. And if we make it available to them, you'll find that a lot of the calls will stop. A lot of the well, I don't say all stop, but a good number of them,

right? We do have some people who are not computer oriented, so those are likely uh to um probably continue. Yeah, there's there's really no way to get to those folks easily um other than that goes out where we can list like the top 10, you know, like sort of big developments that have happened in the last two months or something. Yeah. So that they get paper and see.

So I I do actually before I pass to Scott have one more question. I I'm the one that brought the full swimming pool to y'all's attention today, but I noticed that swimming pool on Saturday and I didn't know what I was supposed to do because obviously you all were not in the office. Um, what was I supposed to do about that full swimming pool? because I think people in this town, we notice things over the weekend and um uh so we need to know what what we're supposed to do if it's particularly a safety thing like this. You know, if it's somebody working on uh you know, cutting up down a tree or whatever, you know, the tree is already, you know, halfway gone by the time somebody notices or whatever. But but this safety issue um uh continued and it was you know a real hazard right in the moment.

Yeah. I think the answer to that probably would have been called I would have called the fire department because I believe the fire department actually knows the rules for safety around pools things like that u or the police department. Um certainly I would think that there would be somebody in one of those new departments who knows that you don't that there's got to be a fence around a pool. They may not know the height. They may not know how far. They may not know all that stuff, but they know there's got to be a fence around the pool. And if that pool was filled on Saturday, how would we have all felt if if a kid had drowned on Sunday, right? Terrible. We would have felt we probably would have felt there would have been fingerpointing going on. It was your responsibility.

Um I wouldn't I would make a call. Certainly make a call. And as soon as we found out about it today, it was just like, wow. So, okay. I wish I had called the uh Yeah. But whichever department or both I want to call somebody because we all know I think you all know that a fence needs to be around the pool and you know certain height limits you know how high it's supposed to be locking gate all that sort of but for Pete's sakes let's at least get the fence out of it right now. Yeah.

Let's just not have some kid drop into the pool and drown. So, I assume there was some permit issued to that builder that would have said when you install this swimming pool, you must do X. No, no, no. If you're building a pool and you're a contractor, you better know the law. You better know that a fence is required. If there's a contractor out there building a pool who doesn't put up a fence and doesn't know it, he should lose his license. That's that's that's building code 101, folks. You cannot build a pool without a fence. My you know, my answer was drain the pool.

Somebody falls in somebody's going to break a wrist. Yeah, but that's a hazard, too, if it's a small child. Yeah. No, but at least, you know, don't let's not let's not have somebody drown on her. Agreed. But I'm Thank you for calling and bringing that to our attention. That was horrible. when I saw that I might jump out of the tree.

Thank you, Carol. It's I'll keep this brief. Um, thank you so much for your time. Uh, I can personally, you know, say from my perspective, uh, I'm honored. I think we're honored to have someone of your experience and, uh, you know, uh, coming to help us with some of these things that we've been working on for years. Um, and it's been, like Alex said, it's been there's been many frustrations that we've had. I had the honor of meeting you this morning. I I went and picked up my packet. Thank you for taking the time. You took more time than I, you know, but I really appreciated that. Um, I'm sure there's a ton of questions that we're going to work out together. Um, but you know, my my m hopefully this is a simple question. Um, but it it it's been an issue with this commission and with the town council and with the planning zoning director, okay, is kind of the hierarchy of how this works.

Um, you know, my understanding is that this town is uh kind of a mayor we council strong type of town. That's right. Um and so the residents elect council members. Council members then appoint the uh what the director or the um town administrator. Yeah. And then the town administrator I think you would report to the town administrator. That's correct. And then your your staff would obviously

report to you. Right now, where we come into this, and this is been the frustration is we'll put together something and think that it's going directly to council and in the past, um, it seems that it's been edited before it gets to council. Um, and you know, so maybe if you could just help us clarify what is the hierarchy and how how do we um I mean we're kind of a a little bit of a separate entity that we advise the council. Um but then how how does it work with you as far as hiring?

Consider me your technical advisor. Okay. So, if you're working on an ordinance, um, part of my responsibility is to make sure that the ordinance is legally defensible. In other words, I can't have you writing ordinance that's going to get the town sued. My job is to point that out to you. You can't do this. You can't say this. You can't put this in writing. However, if you all decide, Mark, go jump in the lake. You can take that you can take that ordinance to council and if council pins me at that meeting says Mark what do you think of this ordinance it's my responsibility to the council to tell them that I feel part of it isn't legally defensible then it's on them they decide what to do with your advis your advisory is the planning commission that's it you know you basically say this is what we think this is our best piece of work what do you think guys and they can say yes no or what happens sometimes they send it back to with five comments like, "We don't like this, we don't like that. Could you rewrite this? We're almost there, guys, but you know, send it back." But I'm your technical adviser, and my job is to keep you out of trouble and to keep you all out of court um and to um and to help you write defensible or what I call defensible ordinances that go into the account. But I will not once you vote I will I have no authority to edit anything that you've that you've passed and and decided to send on to to council. I have if somebody did that in the past they were stepping outside the boundary line.

Yeah. not sure exactly what happened, but thank you um for your time and uh I look forward to getting to know you better and I'm sure that there will be things that um many of us disagree like we disagree with each other. Um but hopefully someone with your experience has already experienced a lot of that and you know there's personalities and egos and world views and uh you know so I I look forward to working with you. Thank you for for questions.

I do have a a quick few here. Uh just mentioned in the portal, is that just for the permitting and building side or is that also code enforcement?

Yes and yes. Uh it can be for just permitting and just for that sort of thing, but it can also be for code enforcement. Um, I have found that the code enforcement part of it is more of a a communication tool between the complaintant and the code enforcement enforcement officer. I don't know how much of that you all feel needs to be made public to everybody, but generally the code portals that I've seen are allow a complaintant to anonymously make a complaint. That's one of the reason that's one of the things that complaintants always have feared is that there's going to be some kind of retribution on them that they've reported their neighbor to you know the the code enforcement officer. So um we can set it up where it would be anonymous and the complaint makes it complaint and then the portal would then show what the ultimate action was at the end. not have we wouldn't get into all the the stuff that goes on in between, but complaint action, you know, remedy.

Awesome. Thank you. And uh uh questions on I know that in the past we've only had one code enforcement, but I think we're approved to now. Are we looking to have weekend coverage for code enforcement as well or is that something not? And then uh one question that's been brought up and we may talk about it in the design overlay, but um when a business is in a say design overlay or some type of violation um would the business in general be violating the ordinance or would the landlord and property owner be violating the ordinance? Would you provide violations to both of those individuals because they own the property and it's not compliance and then also the business or are we only violating to a business owner that is not compliant?

It would be the business owner uh but the property owner would receive a copy of the complaint uh so that the property owner knows that he's got a renegade tenant in his building. Um but ultimately it's the tenant who has to make the correction if there's a correction. Awesome. And one last one. I know in our discussions when I met with you, we talked a little bit about how fines came and everything. Were you able to look and see if we had a fine structure in our ordinances or

I was not um the fine let me clarify by saying fines are established by council only. Okay. You can't establish fines. You can make recommendations to council for what the fines should be. Uh but ultimately it's annually the town council is supposed to adopt or read all of their um fines, um costs for things, those sorts of things. So like for instance, uh if you want to do a zone change, uh there should be a a fee for that. There should be a fee of, you know, let's say $500 for a zone change. Uh that's all got to be established by town council. And if uh and I haven't gotten into them yet, I will tell you that one of the things that I commonly find is I'm a big believer in cost recovery, which means that if it takes me 10 hours to write a zone change for a for a an applicant, the cost of that zone change should be reflective of how much time is spent getting that getting that to town council. I'm a big believer in cost recovery whenever possible. you know, we're not a business. Um, but we're also not a giveaway.

Yes, sir. So, let's let's make sure we get charging. And you mentioned um safe was three weeks uh behind. Is that related just to having the gaps in the director position or is that just normal? That's volume. Oh, really? Yeah. And um I think that's pretty much it. I appreciate your report uh and sage. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Any other questions for it? All right. Next item is business item and uh it's letter A. Safe PD Coastal Coalition uh with senior captain Kelly. Welcome to the plan mission, sir.

Watch a movie. Gosh. And I know that I sent you on this email, but I'm just going to read it real quick. Under South Carolina code 639540, once a comprehensive plan has been adopted, no new public facility, whether a street, park, utility, building, structure, or open space may be construct constructed or authorized until its location, character, and skin have been submitted to the planning commission for review. Our responsibility is to assess the proposal's c compatibility with the adopted comprehensive plan and we are to transmit our findings and the particulars of the non-conformity to the proposing entity if there is one. Should that entity choose to pursue proceed despite our findings, it must be publicly stated and state their intention and rationale with notice published at least 30 days prior to construction or contract of an award. Locally, the Surfside Beach Planning Commission bylaws and relevant ordinance further empower us to determine whether proposed developments, performing good principles and requirements of the comprehensive plan. And they also ask us to recommend capital programs and improvements based on that plan and then also promote orderly development through review and recommendation of public infrastructure projects. This agenda item reflects our statutory duty to ensure the public projects align with the town's long-term planning goals, land use policies, and community standards. Our review is not merely advisory. It is a critical checkpoint in the public process ensuring that it's transparent accountability and consistency with the town's vision. So uh I think I shared with you guys uh where Director Verder has uh highlighted what's in comprehensive plan. I'm sure he may cover that as well and then we'll watch this uh presentation. Uh I know in the past I do not believe the planning commission has reviewed public projects but it is one of our statutory duties um as Mark had mentioned earlier. Uh but basically all we're doing is bas basically making sure it aligns with our comprehensive plan goals and vision and that's basically all our role is

Thank you. Floor is yours.

Good evening and thank you for the opportunity to come speak with you tonight. Uh, I come before you to seek your recommendation to council to approve the proposal for a personal flotation device loaner board. Through a partnership between the Surfside Beach Fire Department at Safe Kids Worldwide PD Coastal, we're able to provide this program to the community free of cost through a Honda grant. This project is in alignment with the multiple parts of a comprehensive plan. This loner board program will support livability and quality of life, signage that distinguishes the town from surrounding communities, provides recreational amenities and programs for all ages, and ensures high level of public safety. I have a short presentation that will help explain the project a little more. Safe Kit's mission is to prevent unintentional injuries to children up to 14 years old. They provide many programs including child passenger safety, safe sleep, whe sports safety, gun safety, water safety, and many more. The Safe Kids PD Coastal Coalition has 257 members that include a variety of groups. Surfside Beach Fire Department is one of the most active and engaging partners with this coalition. This was also uh the main reason that it was chosen as the pilot, the first people to have the opportunity to put this board up. You can see the map of the PD coastal region is the largest in the state covering 11 total counties. Our goal is to help bring education and safety to waterfront with personal flotation device learn program. From 2019 to 2023, children ages 1 to four had the highest rate of drowning in South Carolina. The PD region had the highest drowning deaths in the state. The Surfside Beach Fire Department had 38 incidents so far this year related to water or child safety emergencies. Of those 38, 24 of them involve children. So, what we're seeking is approval to install personal learner. We're looking

for your recommendation to council in the next meeting for this board to be approved. This board will be the first of its kind in the state through Safe Kids Worldwide. They do have DNR boards at landings for different waterways, but there are none on beach accesses up and down Ory County or Georgetown County. This board will have 18 personal flotation devices that can be borrowed and returned. The board will be installed into the sand and will have signage that will have a QR code that is used to provide proper fitment and water safety information. The board is already built and is ready for signage. flotation devices and signage is all provided free of charge through Safe Kids and the Honda grant, but what you see here on the right is the first rendition of the board. I don't have pictures of the new one yet. The new one basically will be just longer boards that go directly in the sand after speaking with uh director Adair. It's going to be positioned at the pier if it's approved uh behind the concrete wall where the bike rack used to be on the other side. So, if you're looking at the pier, it's directly under right before the handicap access area where that concrete wall is. And the post will be buried behind that concrete in the sand. Um, and then it'll stick up up above. Some of the signage that will be on it will have the logo of the town, fire department logo at Safe Kids. As you can see here, the QR code that'll help track some simple data that we're looking for uh to help track the usage and information that Honda will require to renew the grant. The information that they're looking for is the age of the child, the ethnicity of the child, and what county they came from. That's the only three questions they have to answer. Um the idea is the minimum amount of information we're more likely to get people to fill out that survey. The signage will be covered with plexiglass protector to increase longevity and Safe Kids will handle all maintenance and upkeep of this entire board free cost to the town. Um, they're going to be

checking it every couple weeks for usage, wear, things like that. And the paint that they chose, this yellow paint, when it fades will actually turn a little bit orange. So they know it's starting to fade, they can repaint it. So they put that into the project just so that they know, hey, this it needs repainted. They're starting to look a little off. Any questions? We're open for discussion. Any questions? Marella, you may not be able to argue back with people who run the program, but what did ethnic city have to do with it?

Um, it's national tracking for safety. So, some of that helps to where do they need to target more? So, one of the big other components they have is um child safety seats. That's one of the biggest ones Safe Kids does. And they found through tracking that certain ethnicities have a lot less um less common to seek out knowledge for fear of being in trouble. So then they alter the approach of how they reach those individuals with information. So that's the biggest thing is just so they can see if they need to target a specific audience. So, if there is a certain ethnicity that's being left out or or doesn't seem to be um utilizing the program, how can we reach them? Because obviously all children of every ethnicity need the safety that we can provide.

Thank you. I have a question. Um it gets pretty windy at the beach. Yes. Uh how are those are those things secured so that they don't blow off? And so it's a little hard to see in that, but that is a 90 elbow on that PVC that comes up and it'll help hold it in there. Um, and then also just the way that those boards are where it'll be. If they do blow off, they're going to blow off um, right in the concrete area. And yeah, we're going to be down there daily looking at it every couple days. There's a chance they will. Yes. Um, did you say this is a pilot program? We'll be the first. Okay.

So, they not necessarily pilot. We're the first. The first or anything like this at the beach. Anything like this at the beach. The only other uh similar program through Save Kids that they have is called a tree. So, it's a round one and that's used at a lake um higher up in the state and it's for kayak tours. People show up, they'll have a life jacket that can provide them one and it only houses, I believe, 10 life jackets. This will be the first of its kind up and down the beach. Yeah. I mean, I I think it's a great idea. I was wondering if there was a success rate or, you know, some of the kinks that have to be worked out as things go along. So, we're gonna

we're gonna help figure a lot of that out and grow it. Hopefully, more of up and down the beach, pick it up. Like I said, there's a similar program you may have seen at any of the boat launches that DNR does. So, it's it's very similar to that. I know she spoke with DNR. She's also spoke to the Coast Guard auxiliary to kind of figure out when she was formulating the grant how to how to navigate this. Yeah, I think with rip tides and issues we have, I think it's a whole idea. Thank you. And it's not meant just for beach. That's just where we're located. They can take it anywhere. They can use it at swimming pools all through town. They can, you know, the only ask is if it's for

um there are all kinds of rules about what can and can't go under the pier. Mhm. It we know that that's okay. It's it's perfectly fine. Yes, ma'am. I have two questions. So, uh what material is this uh stand? It's wood. Pressure treated wood. And uh do we plan to And you're saying that's ground to fix. So, we're going to dig a huge hole and just put the wood way down. Yep. It'll be 4 feet down from sand surface. That's what John Bear said it needed. Is this a permanent fixture? Are we going to remove it in name storms or No, it'll it'll be permanent.

All right. Any other questions? Uh, one for each of you. Mr. Chair, is this being presented to us because it's considered a capital improvement development? I think I got Boston the signage requirement. I do believe this uh it's just a public so planning commission statutory responsibility is to remove review all public projects and this is a public project so it's being installed on public land and um that's why we're reviewing it we're basically comparing it against our comprehensive plan goals and visions and priorities inside of that and uh I'm just trying to make sure the lines

and thank you and see you captain Kelly you just said it's perfectly fine and put the 4x4s into the sand. Speaking of John there, yes,

love hearing that. However, be mindful of the fact that oh, there was changing rooms that were offered to be have 4x4s inserted in the sand under the pier regardless if it's right next to the bike ride or 5t away for the holo shows for other purposes. um embedded holes for lockers. Um there's discussion of having a wave runner stored under there and they were all can do can't have anything put in the sand other than what's already designed in the concrete. So we heard that from the town from FEMA South Carolina. So but nobody could produce a document saying that's the case. I am thrilled that you're saying perfectly fine. I'm making you aware because there's some other things that make some kind of sense to do whether if you put a rescue wave runner under there where everybody's like no no no we can't do it but we're allowed to have a trash can we have a volleyball court but we we can have this but we can't have another safety life saving device under the right there's

there's a lot of like opinions on the back that don't belong

my my understanding is because this is considered signage versus those are considered structures So, I understand it. It's confusing. Um because that was addressed again. That's why the first van is the wheels. It was a hey, we can move it. That is not permanent. It could meet FEMA regulations. And director D said being signage, it falls under a little different than it does when you talk about changing rooms and everything else because those are permanent structures versus a permanent sign. So, but I thank you and I I I agree. I'm not arguing. I just wanted to bring that up. We had to discuss it. Uh I I understand words you're saying maybe put a sign on the way sign.

Yeah. You finish Alex. Yes. Yeah. Definition of the structure. I mean this would be a structure zoning ordinances. So I understand John's response and I had no problem against it but uh I mean I can buy our zoning ordinance so it would be considered structure. All right. Anything else? Yep. I appreciate it. Good luck with your accent. Thank you.

We did this a little backward. So, I'm going to need a motion to read this and any findings that uh you want to add inside of that if there's no findings or if they are. Uh I make a motion to approve the safe bids coal coalition like vest sign as present. Second. All right. I got Alex and Mariam. I'll approve it. Can you do that? All right. Any other discussion? All right. Everyone agree say I.

I. Anyone oppose say no. Motion passed and we will send over our findings to council. Do you have anything on it, Mark, before we move on? Nothing.

Perfect. Thank you. All right. Next item. We'll move on to discussion items. Uh chapter 17, design overlay review certain sections of chapter 17 zoning design over ordinance of town of Side Beach, South Carolina. Um I'll start this one. Uh Mark, uh we have reviewed this design overlay meeting after meeting after meeting. I know we discussed a little bit about it. Uh I think you went through the minutes and stuff and the good thing is in June 19th, uh we did have a special workshop I believe discussing the design overlay and a lot of elements in here. Uh I I did highlight a few things that I'm going to speak on, but uh just wanted to let you know from June 19 uh our review from this was review the overlay requirements, enforcement and communication with property owners and tenants. These are the high things we highlighted out of that workshop. Uh discussion on responsibility for compliance property owner versus the tenant. Uh so we were really uh conflicted on uh who should be getting this compliance as the property owner or the tenant because I mean most tenants can't go outside and do upgrades to the parking lot and the exterior facilities without the property owner. So we were definitely in a little bit of conflict with that suggestions for clear communication and education for property owners. I think that's definitely a key. Anybody with more communication, more knowledge using social media or even providing pamphlets or resources when we're permitting or anything in general like that, I think could definitely help. And I think we talked a little bit about that in there. And I actually think the business committee is working currently on a new business packet, I believe. I'm not sure if you're aware of that, but um review of the overlay appliance issues of landscaping, dumpster fencing, mechanical equipment, shielding, color requirements were all discussed, discussion on updating thresholds for renovations, which the planning

commission uh has already officially recommended that we uh move the 20% uh of appraised value to a 50% threshold. Uh I know we talked a little bit about that and I hope we have some more discussion tonight before we move that on uh or if we take a different route. Consideration of exemptions for single units and strip mall. So currently we have five the way the ordinance is written now we have five units in a complex. Well we only get one appraisal value in order county taxes. So how do we how do we divide that up and make sure we're complying with 20 to 50%. I think a recommendation to align definitions with state law and international building codes was discussed and discussion on a vacant building registration ordinance and the need for legal view. Um I I looked at other uh building design overlays and other ordinances and found that some places have a vacant building registration that allows uh property owners uh to be able to come and register at uh town hall. And that way you can keep vacancy uh timelines. And also uh some towns take penalties in that after a certain time and uh making sure they're marketing their uh establishments and making sure that they're releasing marketing promote uh new tenency. Um and then also suggestions for PB&Z to create compliance checklist and approve internal processes. So I'm sure you're on top of that and I've probably found a little bit of gaps in between there. Um so from that special meeting, that's pretty much what we have talked about. Um but I know I've talked to you a little bit about it. I think I sent you a few uh notes on some of the design overlays for the new businesses of last month and the previous month and I'm sure that's getting you up to speed as well. So, um I'll open the floor for anybody else and then uh we'll start discussing design overlay.

Anybody have anything discussing design overlay? I'd just like to state a little something about enforcement. Mark, you mentioned that the uh self-appointed code enforcement officers. I think what has happened, and it's true, both commercial and residential, we're seriously lacking in history and continuity. There's been terrible a big lack of continuity in town hall on town council, not so much on this committee. But what happens is staff and council don't even know what was there 3 years ago. And those of us us who are non-commission code enforcement officers remember and we we're inclined to point it out to staff. It gives us a blank look and rightfully so. How would they know? They have no history to look up. So, I I love your idea of of getting that started. As for the design overlay, I think like most of our ordinances, it's not all that bad, but it's not getting enforced. So, we can write all night long. That's all I have.

Yeah. Just to mention a few things. A lot of folks are like, "Well, the design overlays not drew business here." Well, we've not even enforced it in almost the 13 or 14 years that we've even had the design overlay. So, I really don't think that we're able to calculate what the impact of design overlay is. Do I agree with the design overlay? I do agree with a little bit of it and uh other items I have questions about. Um, but I I think it's good that we'll be able to discuss this. I think we've got a lot of notes from a previous conversation. Uh I know that Marcus already mentioned maybe he just present the the commission a draft and I personally with his experience and everything I have no problem with that. I just think utilizing our notes uh from the previous plans and also the current uh zoning where he could see what is able to be enforced and what's not and then we can compare those uh uh drafts. I I would be perfectly fine with that. Any other comments? Mr. Chairman.

Yes, ma'am.

I would like to thank um Mary Ellen for um giving me the history lesson on the overlay. I found it very interesting to go back and read that history and I am uh was sorry when I was reading it, at least as far as I could tell. I would have been very curious as to what uh Mrs. Floyd and Haroldson had to say about the overlay, but that information wasn't in there because I guess they spoke at the public hearing and there was no nothing that recorded what they had to say. Uh because they are the folks that would be affected um at least back then and certainly today because both of my fingers still around. uh and uh uh just how businesses uh would uh uh react because I don't know maybe I don't pay enough attention but I don't see a lot of the overlay in action uh at all and um uh I I think I don't I have a difficulty reading it. And so I would welcome uh Mark rewriting it or revising it and presenting it to us because I I think um a lot of its problem is it is not understandable by uh uh the eighth grader uh or the uh who it who are certain parts of it directed to. Um, I think I heard you say earlier, Mark,

that um uh you thought it was directed to a lot of tenants, but I uh have to say I don't understand how tenants can go and um redo the parking lots. They can't, you know, be clear on that. They Yeah. So, but they're just in charge of their their little storefront. That's really all.

And even some of that they're not in charge of. Uh, I have had discussions with some of the business owners who who wanted to do certain things to the exterior of the um building that they're in. And uh the landlord said no. And so their properties remain non-compliant with the uh overlay. Yeah. So, um, uh, anyway, so far I've been working, for the record, so far I've only been working so far. Okay. Good.

I haven't dealt with any singular singular tenants yet. It's all been the owner's coming forward because because the best trigger you have in here is the change of ownership. the 20 50% thing that's going to be really hard to get my hands on because I don't know what you know what the percentage is of the appraised value. um you know an owner comes to me and says I want to do this I understand you know how to work with them to get to that point it if I may and like I said I would give you the unvarnished truth this is a very unenforcable ordinance um and what it does is it provides and I I'll be honest with it provides me with great power over what does and doesn't get done and I'm the I'm the last, you know, I'm the straw man here. It's you place all of the responsibility for the approval, the I'll call it the negotiation because it's all a negotiation uh with the property owners uh falls on me. And like I said to you earlier, u when I read this ordinance, I know what the spirit and intent of this ordinance is. But I don't think the spirit and intent of the ordinance is is to layer so much burden on an owner that they literally walk away or they don't do anything or they just decide heck with it. I'm not doing anything. Selling the building and I'm moving out of town. Well, that's not what we want either, right? We want to work with property owners. We want to find a mutually acceptable level of improvement to the property. The um contents of what we're looking for in the design are all solid. I've written I think at last count I had written 52

design guideline manuals. Um and this one's pretty well done. The difficulty is applying it to properties that are in different stages of dereliction. Okay, try to say that the right way.

Um, if we applied this like it was concrete solid, this is what you have to do. I would tell you we'd find ourselves in court so fast it'd make your head spin. It's just there's just too much here to place on a change of ownership. So, as your director, what's my job? My job is to work with the property on get them to do as much as I think I can bend them, right? That's what I'm going to do. Um, and I've already dealt with three property owners. I've gone out to properties. Um, some owners are very willing to do a lot of stuff. Some of them literally invested their life savings on just buying this trip center, let alone and and and trying to market it, let alone putting some trees in the parking lot or doing something extra. The um I don't want to belabor this, but I think you all need to take a step back on this thing and just ask yourselves, what is it we're really trying to accomplish here? And what I believe you're trying to accomplish is something that I told Jerry on my second day here. I said, I'm new eyes on Highway 17 here. I'm not one of those people that vacationed here as a kid. My first time here was the first time I interviewed here and I came from the south and I noticed distinct changes as I went through the different communities and I continued past your community to find you know Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle and what they had all done highway 7. I think your goal here is to establish a baseline of good design and how to deal with I'm going to call them what they are these little derelict kind of strip centers that you have. It's not your big buildings that have the parking and have all the landscaping and the nice

lighting. It's these little guys that struggle to just make ends meet and how can I work with them on a case- by case basis to get where it is you want to be. And at some point I think there's probably going to be some one of you or two of you are going to come to me and go we didn't think you we don't think you you did enough. We think you should have pushed hard. Well, I guess what? You can. You have the ability to appeal my decision to the council. So, if you don't think I've done my job, your job is to appeal my decision to the council and see if they agree with you. Um, but I I've told everybody in my department and I've told the town administrator, my job is to work with these property owners one by one, look at their parcel, come up with some unique I've already come up with a couple unique ideas that I'm not going to tell you about yet because they're so cool. Um, on how to just dress up the cord. And I will tell you one of the big wings I have, and I'm not going to tell you where it is, but I've gotten the property owner to take down a billboard on the property in return for lightening up on, you know, doing a whole bunch of things in the building. I consider the removal of billboard a huge win for the corridor overall. So, if I get somebody to remove a billboard, I'm not going to I'm not going to suck it to them, but to put like 75 trees on a property and you know, redo this and redo that, redo that. You're willing to take down that billboard as as a condition of the approval, go for it. That that to me, that that's a win. That's a huge win for us. So, um, in its current state, it's it's just going to be I I've just got to do a lot of reading between the lines here on what you're all trying to get to, and hopefully I get to where we want to be with with the ordinance that you have.

I'm not suggesting you you scuttle this or throw it away or do anything like that. Let's keep it in place. Let's get it adopted by council and and hopefully uh you can put enough trust in me that I'm going to do the right thing with all of these owners. That's that's the best I can do. Are the owners aware of the um I think it's still available the grant programs and I make all of them aware of that. Good. Okay.

They they will be lining up. They will be lining up. It's a $5,000 dollar for dollar. You put in a dollar, we put in a dollar. Uh that's going to go a long way uh into improving like you know some of these buildings just some of them just need a a new coat of paint. Some of them like the light pole like I won't tell you the property because I don't want to. There's a sign out in front. It's one of those pole signs that we all kind of like. It hasn't been painted 40 years. The pole is like chipped and scratched and it just looks like somebody just doesn't care. And I said to the property owner, would you mind putting a coat of paint on the pole? No, not at all. Boom. Win. Right. Those are the kind of wins we have to have to be satisfied with. And it's incremental. Think of it as incremental. As those property owners then turn over, then we can go to another level of improvement and another level of improvement. But taking some of these really is going to be a work in progress. It's just going to be a work in progress and hopefully we get where we all want to be at the end of the day. Just a couple of points that you mentioned. You started with might have difficulty getting your arms around the appraised value. It's actually as written. It's the tax appraised value. If you go on the Ford County website, you'll get the buildings valued,

they separate land and building. Yep. Buildings worth 100 grand do a 30,000 investment that's 30%. Right. So it's the math there should be simple. Not saying it's right or the approach right. Yeah. I'm not saying it's right. If you're if you're struggling with how to get there, that's how to get there. I I don't know if I'm loving the idea of like this bartering mechanism of all for taking a build down. I know I know who you're talking about, but hey, we're lighting up on this. You don't need to put a tree there. Take that sign down. Right next to them is probably like a little grooming place in the dollar store if I'm thinking right.

And they're out of compliance. And then you say, "Well, you put it, you know, you put a tree up there." I didn't need to put a tree up there. Well, you don't have a billboard, so I don't have a billboard to trade. So, now I got to put a tree up. Like, it's I that feels an awful lot like the hell we've been through for the last two years. So, that that made me go, "Yeah, then you know then then I love this thing and start all over. I'm all for it." Well, this couple years anyway because as your director of planning, I've got to negotiate all of these things. I've got to negotiate. It's it's a negotiation and I'm not going to I don't want to put anybody out of business. That's what I'm trying not to do. Yeah. And I'm I don't want that.

I don't think anybody wants I just I just think if you are going to what I heard was we have these written rules. Y you don't have to do these five if you do this one. No, I'm not going to play That's what I heard. Yeah, I'm not going to play it totally that way, but if somebody's taking down a willing to take down a billboard and this and the site is really constrained and I think you know what site I'm talking about. It's really constrained on what they can do. I mean, I've already gotten to them to agree to two or three things that I never thought they'd agree to.

But what would be some of the things you felt would not be legally enforcable and the decorable? You you said there you said I was trying to track you said it was well done but then you said a lot of it's not when you write an ordinance it has to be in black and white. It can't leave like a lot of this to the negotiation of the director. It's got to be black and white. Right. That that's my point about the billboard versus got to be black and white. That's not That's not black and white. What? It's not

what give me an example of something in there that is not enforcable legally. change of ownership. No ch no change of ownership is fine. 50% is fine. It's just the I'll call it the degree of compliance that we're going to look for on every single property. Is it going to be just the same for everybody? Because not all the sites are the same. Some sites have landscaping, some sites have lower sides, some sites just repainted, you know. So, I'm not going to, you know, it's everybody's going to have almost like a custom set of work order things that they're going to need to do to to get I call it a certificate of appropriateness. That's what we call it most places. A certificate of appropriateness that they move forward with the project. It's just it's I mean I saw this and I was literally was scared to death.

And um you shouldn't be because we don't follow them. Don't worry, we don't follow. Well, I have a I have an option that I'd like to discuss with you at the next meeting. Uh, and it's called a three-step uh process. It's very understandable. It's very imp implementable and an eighth grader can understand it. I'll bring it to you. Yeah, because I've done things before. Yeah. Geez, I don't know any We all agree. We all agree, right, that our goal is not to put anybody out of business and to improve the overall aesthetic appearance of Highway 17. I do as long as there's uniform application of whatever the rule is. That's what happened.

I just when you said what struck me as odd was you saying we got rid of the billboard so I'm going to wave all this I was like you know then what can I get away okay but okay but again I I always tell you the unvarnished truth right and I love it then I'm giving it back if I if I do if I decide that and I say the billboard he doesn't have to do anything else you're going to have to appeal my decision basic that's it right you're going to have to appeal my decision I will take truth and not agreeing with it over

Yeah. No, I'm not asking you to agree. I'm just saying, you know, the ugliest thing on the entire quarter. And I told Jerry this like the second day of work. I said, you know what? You ought to scrap this whole thing and you ought to do it a sign a non-conforming sign removal program. That's what you ought to do. Okay. What you want to do is the when you're traveling at 45 the speed limit is 45 miles per hour. down traveling at 45 miles per hour. You're not picking up a lot of things that are in them. Most visible element on the corridor isn't the buildings, it's the souths. And I've implemented what they call sign removal programs in other cities. So like the facade improvement program, you take $5,000 and we'll we'll help you remove that non-complying sign and put up a complanting sign. You want to see an over you want to see a 10-year change in this quarter happen. That's what you would go after. You'd go after non-conforming signs. Number one.

Number two, probably building facades. Number three, again, it's one of my cool ideas I want to bring to you, but I have an idea for how to across the board using a universal solution on how to screen parking lots. Sorry. How to screen parking lots from the road. How to screen parking lots from the road. Oh, okay. Yeah. So people don't have to look at asphalt. Like very much like like mouth signs parking lot.

You've all been to Hilton Head, right? Try to find the thrifties in Hilton Head. It's almost impossible there because their signs are so small. They've gone the other way. They make they make everything so hard to find. Unless you have a GPS, you can't find it. Right. So this is this is a tough piece of this legislation to try to implement. It really is.

So I have a few comments. Um so you you say aesthetics and making sure the appearance of the buildings compliance as well. But in the VA vacancy section over 180 days and then new developments also requires um these properties be brought up to chapter 17 and other ordinances as well. So it's not just uh and it it is a design overlay in general to uh create the aesthetics and the exterior of the the establishments but it's also to continue our building footprint uh continue to develop new buildings because as you mentioned we do have a lot of deteriorating smaller businesses that probably won't be very attractive in the next 15 years. So therefore, if we don't take steps to continue or develop or make sure those buildings are maintained and proper in 15 years, we may not have anything to collect a rental and then they don't even want to do any development currently to the establishment. So who's to say that they're going to tire these? They're probably paid off. Most of our owners are absent in other states. They just they don't really even know what their buildings look like, basically. So I don't think it's just about the aesthetics or the exterior but also continuing that development uh to make sure we are viable in 15 years. A few things that I had marked as well and I and I understand the scrap portion. I pretty much am definitely not uh for any type of negotiation style. We for one we have a lot of uh turnover in the PPC and no disrespect to you. I hope you're here for a very long time. I could implement it one way some

correct and then we're in the same place that we are currently because this has been enacted for 13 years very minimum impact to check or to our highway 17. So therefore you could be the greatest director for the next five years and retire and we get another person then we're back to this step because they may not do the same program that you do. So I'd rather have something enacted easy to view easy to be read by people and be able to make sure it's enforceable. So, uh, not to say everything in here is forceable. I did, uh, uh, I think we shared some notes a little bit about the change of ownership, vacancy, um, and also, uh, the appraisal value. So, I did a little research. I think we're the one we're one of very few towns and cities in South Carolina that actually do the change of ownership or the vacancy or also the appraisal value. Um, so that's very that was very interesting to me because um if we're sticking out here by ourselves, I mean that's definitely offering challenge to it. Not to mention back in 13 years ago that we were in the same place we were today. So that's kind of probably the reason we were a little more stricter because we wanted to see development and we wanted these individuals to develop and uh uh improve their aesthetics and everything as well. So that's probably why it was. Um, so that's something we definitely can talk about later on. I would say another item is uh recently the the civic center come up uh we noticed that uh it didn't have to comply with the design overlay. I'm a very good stickler to that because first of all, if you have a design overlay that you're requiring your residents and everybody in zoning to comply to, it should definitely be public land to require them to do the exact same thing. You can't put stricter rules on the residents than you do yourself.

You should be the example. Yes, absolutely. So, uh I believe I don't know if Mary Ellen could answer that or not, but I believe it was originally in the original proposal for public land to be in that as well. And somehow when it got to council or it's back and forth that possibly was taking it I don't believe it 13 years ago we did not have such a zone. public land as a zone was invented in last five years or something like that. There wasn't any public land. So whether it was overlooked or whether it was engineered by the author at the time of the overlay, I don't know.

Yeah. I'm still May I interrupt for I think something just came out or something just registered in my head that I didn't realize. Are you telling me this has been in in effect for 13 years? Yes. Yes. What has happened out on a corridor that you're all proud of? That we the same thing. Nothing. That is our frustration. I think Okay. Now, now I've reached a new level of frustration. Okay. That's crazy. Yeah. Father, you need to stop worrying about it or get up and do something.

Okay. All right. So, a few I'm going to finish, but I'll give you the floor. Uh, a few other things that I have noticed over the past is accessory structures used in conjunction with business shall also meet the requirements. There's a lot of accessory structures out there does not meet the architectural style. Uh, there's other elements out there probably don't even need to be out there to be honest with you. So, um, that's something definitely if you're going to reddraft or look into may need to adjust that. And then in 1790 issuance of permit certificate occupancy the develop director shall review each application for zoning and building permit determine it adheres to these this criteria and do you personally do that or do other code enforcement everything I mean is that typically in the director's role

yes that's in the director's role that's why I said you've put me as the arbitrator of good taste here

and like you said the problem with that is I retire retire in five years and you get I'll call him Joe Schlockmeister from uh from Florida up here and he's a it's fine go ahead and do that. So you know you don't get any consistency. So what has to happen is you can't depend on me to make sort of these negotiations. What I need to do is I need to be able to hand it to somebody and say do this and it's got to be clear and it's got to be understood by an eighth grader and there's no negotiation. It's a yes or no. You're moving forward or you're not moving forward. It's got to be as black and white as we can possibly make it.

Another item would be the 60-day of compliance after the permit's issued. I honestly don't think that's reasonable on some of these establishments. It takes time to get contract takes time to secure. Even just getting construction started. So, I personally don't like the 60 days. Uh y'all can have your own opinion about it, but um and then also uh you said certificate of appropriates. I think it's a certificate of compliance is what it's called in our ordinance, but it's the same thing. I can go and tell you I don't think that's been utilized in the past either. I think it's more permanent and forget about off and go.

Yep. Um, I circled another thing on chain link fences. Shall not be placed in the front yard of the property. If chain link fencing will be utilized, shall be black plastic coated galvanized chain link fencing. I've seen recently where we've allowed uh chain link all through their fourways of property. So, uh something that might need to look at as well. And in our actually in our um comp plan, one of our priorities in the land use is monitoring amounts of vacant property. So don't know if you have experience in that or if we have any I really don't mechanisms to be able to do that.

I don't I have no experience doing that and I and I'm trying to figure out what the what the purpose and effect of that is. I know why you want to track vacant properties. We're not real estate agents. What are we putting out a list of breaking properties to developers to to come and buy? That's not our job. That's not the job of the civic of the civics. It's it's that's a private property kind of thing. You know, if you want to get your realtors like selling these properties, then they're the ones who should be finding out where the vacant properties are, where the owners are that want to sell, and that kind of thing. There's a t a different kind of ordinance which is a what I'd call a derelict sort of vacant property where a property sits I mean I've had this happen where a house because of either the the the heirs have passed away or it's a um an heirs property. The property will literally sit like it did 15 years ago today and nothing's happened to the property. That's a different type of ordinance and that's an ordinance you probably do need because that is going to happen where you're going to just have derike properties.

Sure. Yeah. Um I I think that um one of the things that we were that the part of that that discussion and wanting to know where the vacant properties were was we want I think at that time we wanted to know how many vacant properties we had because you have 23 vacant properties commercial residential. So I think at that time we had been told several different numbers and there were um concerns over okay are there things that we need to look at since with running out of properties when you run out of properties things change

um homes start being torn down and or moved or completely renovated just things change in the scope of the town and then we were looking at are there things that we need to look at in the ordinances that need to change One of the discussions at that time I think was um maybe David Pellegrina brought up that um uh how many lots did we have residential lots that did we have at that point that could be subdivided and you know take a bigger lot and build two houses on and there was some concern over as we see the lots being chewed up start my desk today

right so I think lot minimum lots size is 3,000 putting up the N. Right. So I think that's where part of that discussion came from just so you have some perspective.

Yeah. So uh another element is the mechanical equipment whether ground level raised to the rooftop should not be visible from any streets. The rideways shall be shielded or screened. That's not been taken care of. Highly tinted wind tinted windows and mirrored glass are not permitted. Uh if we do go forward with something similar uh I think it needs and needs to be spelled out a little more than tinted uh a lot of graphics shielded graphics may not be tent in general but you can't see in their facilities I don't know

what you do instead is you tell them it has to be this is a common practice it's a common standard 88% light transmission nothing more tinted than that it's called 88% light transmission that means it's a clear window and the reason it needs to be a clear window is for is for public safety. Police officers need to be able to drive by and see in. And you can't plaster, you know, 15 different beer signs in front of your window. That's also not 88% light transmission to the property. So, we should probably have something in there about transparency in the storefront so that police officers can witness if there's an actual robbery going on at the same tinted tinted glass. I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a thief. I'm a robber. I'm going with the liquor store with tinted glass. That's where I'm going. But nobody's going to see it.

Um large expansive glass shall be avoided or divided in smaller lights through use of mullings and mutton mutton. So I can go and tell you that's definitely not been done. So I think the measurements come out to 3x3. Any that's nine square foot. So anything 3x3 is required to have those. are definitely uh paying us.

Um also, um as I rode around looking at the new established everything, I I've seen the difference of MOI carts being used in dumpsters. I don't know if in typical design overlays if commercial property requires a dumpster because in some of these plazas, you see 25 moi carts either on the side of their buildings or in the back. So, it really don't make sense to me. I don't understand why they wouldn't have one shared dumpster for the property or each individual unit should have its own dumpster. I don't know how Publix works handles that. I don't know the answer to that.

Um but I have seen that where there's I know for one business at least has about 25 mobile and uh that kind of caught my eye question. So um signing shall be designed, constructed, installed by licensed sign company. Is that typical in design overlay? Uh because I could tell you many signs that go up are not designed. There's some of them just wood paint and stuff on them. Don't know if a sign company actually does. I don't know the permitting. You would you would put something like that.

Yeah. Pre-standing signs and wall shines. So complement the architectural style of the building and shall be designed as an architectural element of the building. Uh I will tell you that in some of the design callouts I mentioned, uh we went back and forth with non-conformity and conformity. Uh, but when I look at signs out there, and I know you caught it out in your travels up and down 17, signs was a very big thing. Um, so, uh, if we get an old sign out there that's 50 years old and rust and everything, I appreciate the paint, but it's not meeting the architectural style of the the facility itself. So, uh, that's something we may need to either take out, modify, or bring up the code. Mention that the business committee is working on a new business packet. I hope they give us some visibility in that to make sure good information in there. But we will see. Uh landscape and design standards. Landscape requirements shall supersede parking requirements for commercial districts. There is a few established out there does have a very small parking lot. So I don't understand if I think the parking may need to super exceed the landscape requirements, but we can look at that. And then we mentioned a change of ownerships already. point out that one point the change of doesn't it say change of ownership by sale that was added out of concern for a mom and pop inherited business but they didn't they didn't want to destroy a family business they were wanted it just to be you know a literal sale not not a family inheritance

there is text in here where it protects the inheritance of not climbing with the Yeah. But ownership still the sale of it to a a non relative or inheritance I think has start and that's pretty much all I have. I mean we've dissected this many times. There a lot of information in our minutes. I have no problem with you creating something. I I personally don't like the barter style. I would love something on paper and something that we can all follow and if you leave you're still following it. Um that's just my opinion. So yeah.

Well, you've got an ordinance that they've had for 17 years and not a lot has happened. So yeah, maybe uh and I and you know, please understand this when I do sort of dump on something that I I look at, you know, I've written these things before and I and I I look at and I kind of go, it's not really great. I don't want anybody, please don't take it personally. I know sometimes people have spent months crafting things. Um, but you hired me for my professional my profession. You know, my expertise on this stuff. Um, the reason nothing's happened in 17 years is because it's an uninforcable ordinance. Amen.

You know, you're basically asking old old businesses to to rebuild almost like it's a new business. That's that's what this basically says. You know, you're talking about science. Nobody is going to give up a sign that's out there and put up a conforming sign without some kind of assistance. Um and and you know I just know you know I've been expert witness in at least five law lawsuits against cities and defended cities. I know what works and I know what I can defend and I know what I can't prevent. Um this is an indefensible ordinance. when I need to come to you with is an enforceable word that's going to be applied equally and fairly across the board and it gets us maybe doesn't get us an A+ rating on our on our restaurant window but it'll get us a D. Okay. And I think, you know, small wins I I think are important and I'd love to see uh, you know, a couple I've got three properties right now, change of ownership, but I'm talking to you and trying to get them to do the right thing and so far I've met with fairly good response on all three of them. Mr. Chair,

Scott. Yes.

Okay. So, I've been called the voice of reason. Um though they might debate that. Um I I happen to be a business person. I've been a business person since since I've been a a kid. I grew up one of seven kids. We were dirt poor and I did all right. Actually, God is blessed. And when I hear what you're saying and it it it it shows the difference between some opinions and a business owner's opinion when you said, you know, you have this big sign and then you you having these other things. Either you can come up with uh $300,000 to comply to all these rules or let's let's break bread together and figure it out. as a business person who's trying to stay in business, that's what you want to hear. And you say, you know what? Thank you. Thank you. And as much as I respect the opinions of others on this commission, it's been one of my frustrations that they haven't had. And you know, they might have uh had their own businesses, but there's a difference between having a business, having payroll, um either living or dying by running this business. And so if you haven't run a business for 10 years or 20 years, your own business, where you you fail or you succeed, um you can't understand what it's like to to run a business. And seeing this town and and knowing these ordinances that we have, um it's, you know, the design overlay is what we're discussing now. I appreciate I've I've worked in the private sector. Um, and I've worked for public services,

but I've never actually been a public servant. Um, I appreciate that you've had more public service, but also have understood what it's like to actually run a business. And it's not what it's not for the weary. You have to be driven. You And if you don't have money, I started out I bought my first house was $16,000. Um, I didn't have loans from my parents or anything. I had to work through it. And so you understanding both sides of this. I think hopefully I I really wish we had more and I'm putting out the request. If there's any business owners that want to join us, please please do because I'm not on here because I want to add more regulations to businesses. I'm not on here because I think we need to write more code. I don't I'm not here I'm I'm here to be hopefully a voice of reason. keep this limited so that we as a commission aren't pushing our views of how you should run your business on them. I believe in individual rights. It's the American way. I I believe in working hard and I believe in fairness and and reasoning and being able to work with these people so that we can clean up this place. And I think it's possible if everybody if every business here had a million dollars in their bank account, maybe this kind of thing would work. But clearly this has not been working. Um I don't know. I don't want to say too much, but I did write um couple things down and I might have already hit them. Um, I think if you have so many rules and regulations and obstacles, it is almost it sometimes could be impossible to follow those

and stay in business at the same time. Um, you know, it's been a frustration and I, you know, I'm considered here the oddball on this commission, yet out there I'm considered the normal person. So, um, I think it's just because, you know, I've had to get in the muck and work my ars to survive. I didn't I've never had the opportunity to to go to a job and then take a paycheck at the end of the week, you know, so I didn't have to worry about all these things that we're pushing right here. And I really and and I I've always said and I'm a little bit passionate about it because it's frustrating when I hear some of the responses and I know their hearts are right, but um they just don't understand. It's hard to put your feet in somebody else's shoes. And I wish that we could do that. And I wish, you know, I go back to my Christian background, which is, you know, before you take the speck out of somebody else's eye, take the log out of your own eyes so you can see clearly. And, you know, it's easy to criticize everybody else. It's easier to point the finger. But, you know, when when regulations and rules I've noticed and I've been paying attention, when they affect us individually, we sing a different song. When we realize, oh my gosh, that's going to affect me. I don't want somebody to come knock on my door.

And so, I hope that we as a commission can do that and understand and take your experience, your life experience. There's brilliant people on this commission. They're very, very smart. Um, but some of us are younger. We don't have the experience as much. you've been in I'm sure you've worked through several things and I don't know we might disagree on many many things but uh we clearly need a new new approach and um for as long as I'm here I'm going to keep ringing this bell of freedom liberty hard work you know the American way where you can start a business and actually survive and and you know expand and I believe that you let the free market work itself and then things become more beautiful. It's not the other way around. Communist countries force things or socialist countries force things on on people and what happens things go to crap because it's not possible. So, I'm off my red box or whatever the boxes that I'm on. But thank you for understanding. Um I have a passion about it and really my passion is not about me. It's about these businesses and the business owners and the residents here and making reasonable laws design overlays and um and looking through other people's eyes if we can possibly do that. And I'm I'm willing to be wrong. I want to see I want to do the right thing. I don't want to just do what I think is right. I want to do the right thing. And if I'm wrong, I want to correct. And I've learned a lot from these these folks. I've had individual meetings with them. And you know, Mary Ellen's said some things that I'm like, you know what? I didn't think of it that way. We are a unique town. We're a two square mile town and we have valuable valuable property and we want to keep it beautiful. But how do we accomplish that? How best? And I think having a a fresh new approach, I hope you can stick with it a little bit longer than our last, you know, um planning zoning

commissioner, but uh we're in a unique situation that we're working with you, but then you're doing your thing and then you um you know, your chain of command is not to us, it's to the town administrator and then the town administrator reports to the council. So, um, thank you for clarifying that, too. Thank you very much. Thank you, Scott.

Um, so I've been authored the document, Frank, like I already said it could throw it out of this like it's never been thought. I've got no emotional ties to it at all. Okay. driving this question. Does Surfside Beach's Department of Planning, Building, and Zoning intend to follow the the design overlay until such time that you're booked? Absolutely.

Which parts of the design overlay for that property that you're getting rid of the billboard did you tell the property owner that I'll need to listen to? No. Thank you. And finish how I started. We can get rid of this tomorrow. Come up with something better. As long as it's here though, I think

Yeah. The the the the issue that you've had is you've had an ordinance on under on the books for 17 years. You've had various individuals trying to implement it because ultimately it doesn't say the planning commission is deciding this. County council isn't deciding it. town administrator is inside the development director is deciding and for better or for worse you've had I don't know how many directors in the last 17 years but you know show me a property that's gone through this and and you can all point to and go see see that property let's do that yeah okay so what does that tell you folks okay comments on the design overlay

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Please.

Um, I uh uh think the whole thing should be blown up and started over uh again. And so I would welcome uh whatever this three-part process that you are envisioning so that we can figure out how to um move the properties forward. uh on this. I like the idea of uh nonconforming sign removal and providing some sort of incentive to get the businesses um or the uh property owners, whichever ones are the signed

um uh uh violators,

uh to um uh get them uh taken out. It's, you know, sounds like it's very similar to lots of ordinances where, you know, we'll buy back this from you, we'll buy back that, you know, whatever to get uh people to change. I think it's a great idea and we just need to get it started to move forward and because I do think um I think it was Scott that said this is that you know once you once um certain uh property owners and maybe some of the businesses see some improvements and we increase business traffic in town then uh others are going to be uh encouraged uh to do things. Um I think um I disagree on uh two things that you said. one is forcing uh the change in ownership if somebody doesn't want to uh comply uh with things and and I'm basing it on um uh the um chairman of the business uh committee when he came and talked to us and but basically what he said is give every business uh give every property owner a year tell you've got a year to uh comply with the overlay. And he said if you have owners that don't want to comply, uh maybe that forces them into a sale or a change in ownership. And he thought that would maybe be a good thing. I don't know. But I put that out there for uh your

consideration. Okay. In terms of vacant um uh commercial properties, um I know of at least one business owner who um was looking for a new uh location and uh she had a devilish time trying to find uh and get in contact with uh property owners who uh might be willing to do business uh with her. And she she learned from some of the property owners in town that they weren't really interested in um engaging with her to become a tenant. And her thinking was, well, they just have this property as a as a tax write off and they don't really care about um it uh offering it to the business community in Surfside and making um Surfside a better place. And that was very disheartening to me to to know. So, I think that to me kind of dubtailed with uh the idea of maybe having uh properties that are underutilized um somehow for people to know about them. And she was in touch with lots of real estate folks trying to get uh uh a property identified. Uh there's ro there's roles in that typically isn't the it isn't the role of civic government to promote that that is usually falls on a chamber of commerce a business committee a you know something like that that usually falls to them I'm surprised that your chamber of commerce

for instance if you have a chamber we don't have okay there's part of the problem right there normally if I come to a town let's say I come here for the first time cool Yeah, I'm going to open up a surf shop here. Where can I find a vacant property? You know, the first place I'm going to the Chamber of Commerce. Hey, Chamber of Commerce. I've got a whisbang business. I've got this new surfboard that's just coming out that nobody has. Find me a place. A good Chamber of Commerce will have that person in in a property in 30 days. Are we too small to have a chamber of commerce?

Yes. You're probably too small to have a chamber of commerce, but you're not too small to have a like four or five town. I've seen that done where it's like four or five towns. Paul is

partner with so you have like a chamber. I mean, that's where I would go if I found out there wasn't one here. I'd go, okay, where's the big city? Okay, I'm going to Myrtle. Myrtle's probably going to try to get me to locate in Myrtle, right? uh because usually it's a chamber of commerce has their own introspective view on their own town but I'm not telling you that I have the answer here but I've seen like small towns like let's say Pauly's Murals Garden City and and Surfside all group together and have a mini chamber of commerce and that's and they're the ones who are supposed to have that database available to prospective tenants. It's not the again it's not the role of government to to sell and buy property.

Okay. No, certainly not to to sell and buy property but or to even have that those you know that type of information. Okay. So, as you I hope uh take on this task of uh retooling rebuilding this uh Surfside has uh as I understand it a reputation of being uh a difficult place for businesses to do business and some of the businesses choose to go over the line into Garden City. Y

uh and so I think we need to figure out how we um overcome

uh that problem uh and uh at the same time uh give uh a lot of attention to the fact that when our citizens told us what was needed in for the comprehensive plan They said 17, it looks awful. It's it's our, you know, our front yard or whatever and it's not inviting and we need to do something about it. Uh, and a number one uninviting is the corner of Surfside Drive, uh, and 17. And, uh, I don't know what we do there. Um but uh uh if we can uh get that uh property owner uh on board to uh um

Yeah, that's your final words. That's your 100% port. Yes. Right now it's dominated by a fast food restaurant, a gas station, series of small businesses and and and a bank. There's no gas station there anymore. Vacant gas station was a gas station. a vacant gas station. That's even worse, right? Gas station. A vacant. And it's been that way for about two years, maybe three. And there might be an environmental issue. Yes. Leaking tax. No. No. I saw the report. And see the report. They claimed that they took the tanks out. That doesn't mean there's not an environmental issue.

I understand. I understand. But but some people thought that the tanks were still there. That's all. But uh anyway, wait. I don't know what we do to uh uh encourage Well, I'll tell you something. Highway 17 through Surfside is a 100% better than surf than Garden City. It's not as nice as Paulie's. Paulie's is just like wow. Yeah. Yeah.

And a lot of it has to do with the landscaping of the medians and the size of the medians and the width of the width of the highway. Um, first thing I noticed when I came over the line into your town was the proliferation of large high I'll just say high pole size high pole size versus monument size.

And those are still according to the ordinance those are still conforming. That's still the the the metric that we use is it would still allow fairly high signs. So, one of the first things my proposal would be would be I'm going to come to you with a revised set of standards for signs on Highway 17 because right now there's only like three or four signs on the entire quarter that I would call non they're legal non-conforming signs. That's a specific set of words there. legal meaning when they were put in at the time they were legal. They're now due to ordinance changes non-conforming. So they're legal non-conforming. So they're protected. Another popular word you grandfathered. Okay, that's what it means. They're grandfathered. But how do we get them to move away from that leg legal non-conforming side to a conforming side? That's that's key. That's key thing to try to get some traction on. And if it's using facade improvement money to make changes to signs, boy, I couldn't be I couldn't be happier if we could use it for that. But I don't know what the facade improvement program

specifically can be used for or not be used for. But that's just something we we'll just we'll cross that bridge. We'll cross that bridge. I'll bring some changes to the signals. Let's let's blow it up and fix it. Yeah, let's let's fix it.

Yeah. Thank you, Carolyn. Um just a few uh this is the last comment I've got and we're going to move on to the next item. But unless somebody else wants to speak quickly, but I think we've talked and beat this design over late tonight, but I think he's got a good uh concept of what the commission's looking for and uh I I trust uh this is where I do bard. I I trust that your experience and knowledge as uh many years of experience will be able to produce something that is enforceable and uh also protects the aesthetics and improvement progress of social beach. So I appreciate that. But I do want to mention that uh uh there was a little talk about freedoms and everything. I'm definitely a a supporter of freedoms. Uh the only thing that I have conflicted with that is the fact that we have had a design overlay for 13 years. 13 years ago we were talking about a design overlay and creating a design overlay for the fact that we didn't have any movement to development or the aesthetics and to put that in the hands of business owners to be able to continue and approve their aesthetics. 13 years later we haven't enforced anything and we still very minimum impact to chapter or highway 17. So, um I think it's definitely important to have minimum readable and uh also take in consideration the business owners because I am definitely understanding that we do attract local businesses that probably don't have huge investments or huge bank accounts and that's kind of what we also discussed in the comp plan of attracting uh that type business as well. We don't really want the national change and I'm all for that. I have no issue with that. But to have nothing on the books and to require nothing is just not that's out of the books.

Yes. Correct. We'll still be in the stage we are 13. So with that being said, any other comments and we will move on. Go ahead.

Go ahead. All right. Um, no, I'm not going to say I I I I just Thank you for what you've just said and I think it's um fair statement and understanding the pers perspective of someone else. Um, it just comes to mind and I'll just say it really quick. I follow the law. I drive at the speed limit or under the speed limit. But I just wonder the people who are saying these businesses have to follow every dot and tit of this law. I wonder how many of us have gone 31 miles an hour in the 30 mph zone. Um or 46 in 45. Um there's a thing called grace. And as a Christian, thank God God has given me grace because I haven't been perfect. And so I don't expect people to be perfect in my life because I know that I'm not perfect. Um and so you know having a little grace and understanding and reasoning with each other I think is a good good thing. And and um Mr. Rotor Roer sorry um I think uh you made a very good comment and I just forgot. It's good. So, um, but it was good. I know it was good. So, uh, but thank you very much.

All right. Uh, we're going to move on to our next discussion items. Uh, the planning commission proposed tree ordinance review of the pro proposed draft presented by the commissioner McKeen.

All right. uh 6 weeks since I last volunteered to uh take a look at the tree ordinance and uh the things I promised at that time is I'd find a way to simplify it uh shorten it and to balance the property owner's rights with the public's desire to maintain uh uh appearance canopy and and those kinds of things. So this is this document which is written by somebody who doesn't know how to write legal documents necessarily. Um uh it is my best uh my best effort at this. And you'll notice the old documents were in the 40page range. This is down to eight pages. And uh I did this by getting rid of a lot of combinations of things just and mainly about lots. So we have I took the approaches we basically have developed lots in town and these could be residences or business lots.

Can I just interrupt one second? Let me just give some context here for Mark. Uh okay. So, we had an existing chapter 17 ordinance and and enacted and uh not always enforced and uh we currently have it. Uh so, the planning commission worked on a tree ordinance uh in 2021, I believe. Um and they proposed a tree ordinance to town council with very minor changes

with minor changes. Uh town council uh pushed the tree ordinance to the storm water committee. The storm water committee worked for three years proposing a new chapter 18 uh tree ordinance which I'm sure you've all uh reviewed and checked out y and new existing. So uh what we did is uh we identified that uh in our statutory uh job duties would be uh by the state of South Carolina it's our responsibility to uh create an ordinance to tree preservation and landscaping. Y

uh so that was sent back to us for review. So we we took the storm water committee's uh proposal, we took the existing proposal and we asked Larry to work on it to create a baseline so that we could make sure the good elements of the chapter 18 proposal and the good elements of chapter 17, our existing ordinance were met. And then what our plan was to review this ordinance uh going forward to see if we had any other additions or if we didn't like something was added in the baseline. And then we would probably like to look at inviting the stakeholders uh John stormwater committee and other uh folks to be able to also implement their information.

Okay. And that's where we stand. So uh Larry's been working on this proposal for six weeks and this is from the chapter 18 and our existing or Thank you.

So my approach has been split things down into fewer combinations. I mean, there's so many combinations in both those ordinances. I figured we have developed lots that could be residential or or business that are already developed. We have redevelop lots. That's when somebody comes in like in a residence, raise the house, and build something totally new. That would be a redevelop lot. And then there's a few lots left that are still covered with trees. I mean, you know, they're jungles. And uh so I took the approach of looking at those four or five four combinations and trying to provide some guidance on on how to handle trees in those situations. And uh most of us thought the uh stormwater committee I mean they did a a magnificent job uh of of putting together a a really good ordinance overall. However, I thought it lacked consideration of a prop what the property owner has rights to do to their own property. Uh we thought it was a bit extreme. So, a lot of what they've written I've cut into these these portions along with some of the original the existing tree ordinance and uh yeah, I I've adjusted some of the numbers and I've formatted it the best I can do and I'm ready to say this is this is what I propose, but I expect there'll be plenty of changes to this uh from the commissioner, from our director perhaps. Um

if we're going to proceed with this uh work on this in the next uh month or two, I'd like to pass it off to somebody because I am really personally busy over the next six weeks. So, I won't have a lot of time to take feedback and apply it to this uh directly. So, if we could pass it off to one of the other commissioners, it would be great. Um, but I'm open to hearing I I'd love to hear comments about this. It's, as I said, I tried to balance it. Thank you, uh, Mr. P Melanie.

Mr. I think go too far down this discussion. Are we going to take the same approach that we took with the overlay and ask the director? We've been waiting for our director to come. We put things off waiting for our director to come and ask him his opinion about how we move forward. My out of our last discussion concerning the overlay, my biggest takeaway from that, which I'm very happy about, is to hear that we are going to be having a staff person write the ordinance. not the planning commission, not town council, a staff person who has the experience in writing ordinances with with our input as to what the what we want the intent of the ordinance to be. So, I think if it's turned over to someone, in my opinion, I hope that Mark will

That's uh what I was going to suggest. I mean, that's our typical uh route. He's definitely

uh but I want to take in consideration that we do have multiple and I'm sure he can work at his own pace as he feels great, but I want to take in consideration that we have the design overlay. We have the landscaping and tree protection. I think the design sign ordinance is definitely in many conflicts over the whole town. So, I also think comp plan, uh, which we talked a little bit about with Mark, uh, don't know where we're moving forward with that. I know there's a conflict with state law specifying that if we don't have an impact fee that we don't have to propose a um a uh a what is it, capital improvement program. And then also with that, our local laws require us to and our state law doesn't require us to. So either we need to fix the ordinance with the state or local law stating that we don't have to or we're still breaking the law if we don't do it. So uh we need to look at these things as priority items. I I think we're in a much better place when design overlay but I also do believe it's important and I'll let you speak uh on what you can do and what you propose but yes that is the structure uh I fully agree with. I mean, what I don't think we did we did minor changes with a design overlay outside of the vape shop, but most of the vape shop ordinance was pretty much written for us. I think we mod a few modified a few uh bits of paragraphs and uh the we even had the attorney review it. So, uh I think we're in a good place for that. And then the design overlay, we only change 20 to 50%. So I don't think we really delve too deep into uh changing that but absolutely that's the structure uh the director should be able to take our feedback and create a or

so my my intent in that certainly is not to put too much work on on him since we just got him and don't want to lose him but um I'm I'm feel confident that he will know and and we are don't anybody up here forget we are a tiny piece of his job. He has a pretty big job that doesn't have anything too much to do with what we're doing. So that was not to throw it at you and say, "Hey," but that was to say before we get mired down in this discussion, what approach do you think we should take?

Okay. Thank you. um 25 years of preparing ordinances. I will tell you the two two most contentious ordinances that I've ever written and I've written 17 tree preservation ordinances are tree preservation and short-term vacation rentals. Those are the two most contentious ordinances I have ever written. The first one I wrote, the first short-term vacation rental ordinance I took took took 18 months to prepare, took another six months to adopt, and after a year we modified it. So that's to say that no ordinance out of the box is perfect. Larry, thank you very much for taking what I first saw and distilling it down to this because this is going to make my job a lot easier. Now, I have never written a tree ordinance that exceeded five pages. It has charts on it. It has easy to follow graphs. People understand it. There's a lot of verbiage here, Blair. You know that, right? You went through this and you did you did a really good job of organization, by the way. I mean, it's almost like you know how to write how you how to write ordinance sections. Um, I have not done a deep dive on Larry's work here. I have. and it's just because I've had other other things that's going that are going on. Um, this is not going to be my highest priority right now. Right now, I consider the design overlay a higher priority unless you tell me different. Um, right now I am approving and disapproving tree removals right now based on the current ordinance. And

I find it a bit humorous that it takes three people in my office to figure out what the ordinance says and what we're what we're telling property owners they can and cannot do. That to me says spells trouble. That means that I interpret it different than Keith interprets it versus what Brad interprets. That means that the property owner out there is having a very, very difficult time interpreting it themselves. And what you want is you want one that the property owner when they decide they're going to do something and they know they've got a tree ordinance, they can go and read and go, "Oh, you know that big live oak tree right in the middle of our property? we're going to have to shift our household and that kind of thing. So, this is more this is more than a tree ordinance. This is a tree and landscape ordinance. And uh my first recommendation would be that you're going to split the divide there. Tree preservation is very very distinct and very very much its own thing. Landscaping is something completely different. that they're related of course because they reflect the plant material but one is very different than the other and tree preservation is is very important your tree sitting you've got a very I think a fairly robust tree canopy if you look at the surround I've done aerial photographs look at like communities around you you've done great I mean I don't know what happened down south boy but they just they just cleared out their canopy it's gone and it doesn't come back.

Supposedly, we're at 39% coverage. 39%. It's really good for an urbanized city. The state is 30% over. Yeah. Overall, the state it's going down quickly now.

It's going down quickly. And and I I'll I'm going to share promise. I know this is running much longer than you thought it should run and I I apologize, but this is my first meeting with you and I think you all need to get a sense of how I approach these things and the the attitude in that day. Presented today with a tree removal plan that was going to remove a live oak tree. My first my first reaction was hell no. We're saving that tree. They're going to build their driveway around this thing. And you know, I'm hella high water. Then I went out on the site and a tree serving doesn't always tell you the full story. It was a live oak, but I could send every one of you out to the property and you wouldn't be able to find a live oak on a property. And the reason is is because it's a live oak that goes like this. It literally grew like back into the ground and it's surrounded by shrubbery and there is nothing representing a live oak tree at all. But it's identified on a tree survey because it's a species of live oak, but it's not a tree that any arborist would say you need to save that tree because that's a that's beautiful. No, that's that's the problem with tree ordinances, okay, is that we have these things that say we're going to save live tree live oaks. I'm 100% on board with saving every live oak tree that we can. But when I was presented with a photograph of what live oak looked like, I went, "Oh, okay. Well, well, yeah, maybe we save that tree and that tree and we get the the number of inches on the parcel that we need, but that's not going to be that's Nobody. None of you. I guarantee you none of you would say it's a vet that

is there not an appeal process though for them to be able to remove it if that's the if there isn't there should be an appeal and usually the appeal process to the board of adjustment. It's board of appeals. Yeah. Board of adjustment. They're called 17 different things and 17. Yeah. So I mean we have a mechanism now that would be able to address that issue.

Yeah. It would be it would be unkind to us to say you have to say that and I'm sure any board of appeal or adjustment would would feel the same way. So, you know, sometimes you just have to go out in the field and you have to look and sometimes, you know, a lot of people in my position don't get out and go look at the tree. Um, I haven't done a deep dive on this. I will tell you that I could give you a tree ordinance in two days because what I'll do is I'll go back to one of the best ones I ever wrote and I'll change the word on it and come back and it'll be exactly what we want. It'll be everything that's in here. Um, but I'm not prepared to do that just yet because I need to look and see what Larry's work has in here. What elements in are in here that most tree ordinances don't have? But I will tell you before I came to this meeting, I looked at John's Island, Sullivan's Island, Holland, Georgetown. None of them were over five pages long. Okay.

Are you were you able to review the storm water committee's proposal and our existing ordinance already? I guess both. And that was and that was and that was the comment that I made in my director's report.

There's things that the storm water committee did that cannot be lost. There's good work there. It's just not chapter 17 good work. It's like chapter 18 or 19 good work or or goes into storm water ordinance. I am not a when I don't know something, dude. I'll be the first one to do. I don't know a lot about storm water. I don't know a lot a lot about how trees and storm water work. Mentally, I think I I fig can figure out that trees have a lot to do with storm water, of course, but I don't know the science of that, but I read that ordinance and there's a lot of good work in there that should not be discarded simply because it doesn't fit into a tree ordinance. There is a place for that in an ordinance and municipal code. I'm just not sure who runs the trap, you know, who runs that that trap next. Um, we don't have a storm water expert on staff. So, I can't turn that over to them and say, "Make this into chapter 18 of the municipal code." So, I I when I don't know something, I tell you, I don't know what we do with it. I don't know. But I will tell you, don't lose it. Three years of hard work went into that thing.

Absolutely.

And there's some good stuff in there. And part of it I thought, you know, there was some stuff on pruning idea. And I kind of chuckled to myself, I'm not going to become the tree pruning zar, okay? I'm not going to go out and tell people how to. So I thought to myself, why don't we hand out when we hand out a tree permit a handy dandy guide to how to trim a tree? Because I tell you, arborist trim a tree. But I'll tell you, just because you're a tree service doesn't mean you're an arborist. Okay? My degree, my undergraduate degree is in landscape architecture. So I know more about trees than than most people, but I'm not an arborist. Arborists job very very specific. They're licensed and when they put their name and stamp on a plant, they are putting their license at risk. So, let's take their work and recommend to council that they consider making it part of the municipal code but not part of the tree or

early on you mentioned that um you felt like um some of the elements may not need to be in chapter 17. Is there a reason why that you feel that way or Yeah, because they just don't have any place in a tree preservation. So, you would you would recommend that being in stand alone different chapter?

Yep. Yeah. There's a lot of good stuff in the I'll call it the the storm water committee's plan. There's a lot of good stuff in there. A lot of it is going to be in the tree ordinance, but a lot of it doesn't belong in a tree ordinance. It belongs in like a like a a storm water chapter of the of the code. All right. Um, I know that I mean I'm not going to go through all of my stuff here, but um make notes of this, but um when we if currently if we had a tree work or a tree I think it's called a tree some kind of permit but they have plant tree plan. Is that what it's called? Currently, they have to require when they get plaques and stuff, they have to add a tree plan to it. Okay. When this uh this document, it states the PWDP application may be approved by the PB&Z director. I have a lot of issues because I see a lot of ordinances that state hey the code enforcer or I know that we've modified a little bit in last meeting from the old document as well but even in our existing ordinances they say you do stuff but actually Angie permits it or the code of enforcement official gives a violation and sometimes it still directs to you. So I definitely in any proposal I definitely would like to clear that up to say who have public I don't care if it says the planning building and zoning official and that covers everybody in it but I think that should be done unless it actually is a physical responsibility of the director.

It doesn't matter that the director doesn't actually do it. I'm responsible for it. Okay. So I'm like the captain and head of an infantry. I might have a machine gun around my inventory, but I don't know how to run a machine gun, but I depend on that person to report to me. So, I am ultimately the captain and responsible for all of the permits there.

So, one of the problems with code that I pointed out in my code is that my title is named five different things in this code. And that's because this has been rewritten and written and written and rewritten. Uh my proposal come budget time uh to the uh town county town administrator is I want to give this to a firm that can take this and rewrite it in one what I call it in a single voice. That's how ordinances are supposed to be written in a single voice so that it's clear and understandable. Right now I have a hard Yeah, I've been doing this for a long time. I have a hard time navigating this thing. It's tough. It's I I suspect probably part of the reason that you've lost directors because I I lay awake at night thinking about this kind of stuff. I know you think that's crazy, but I do. Um, so yeah, this this just needs a rework. I mean, and hopefully you'll support uh you know, some some kind of a budget augmentation to the department that I go out and hire a consultant because I can't I can do it, but I wouldn't be able to do anything else for the next year. And that's that's not an effective use of my time.

Another element is 17727 here. And I know we may not utilize this, but it says uh no fee no fee trees permits for trees and branches greater than 8 in may be granted. The conditions considered are and then it goes down to six. The tree is diseased, dead, weakened by age, storm, fire, or other injury which is a source of hazard. People, buildings, or other improvements. But in my learnings, there's nobody in PB&Z currently that is certified in any type of understanding. I'm being told that we're utilizing an app to tell us if the treere is dead. And I just don't feel like that's appropriate means to be able to do that.

Yeah. I'm not certified, but I can tell you strict. The site that we're talking about has two big pine trees on it, and they're completely wrapped by vines. Have you seen that happen? Pine trees. Those trees are under stress and are going to die within the next five years. I'm not an arborist. I will never tell you I'm an arborist. But I can tell you what a less trianthos is. I can tell you what a quirkus quirkus uh alba is. I know trees. I know you I know the science of trees. You don't get to be a landscape architect without knowing trees. Um problem is though is that I'm I'm not going to be here in 10 years and you're going to have a person who doesn't have the understanding of trees. So, it's got to be written in plain English so that the uninitiated non-landscape architectural background person come in and go, "Oh, I understand that." Right. That's what you want.

Yeah. And another element in here, I believe, and you can correct me, Larry, but I've I read it before I come and I'll try to dig down as much as I can, but um we went away from requiring certain nonprotected trees to be pruned stuff, but I'm concerned because I don't have a lot of knowledge about trees either, but if I went out there, decided I wanted to cut it, I didn't want to I don't know what type of tree it is to tell you the truth. So, um I don't know I don't know how many people is going to be like that and if there's no notification to town council to say or if there's no notice to town high or PB&Z to say hey I'm going to go prune this tree and they're not getting a no fee permit or anything the PB&Z is not going to be able to know or look or whatever it's just going to be cut down. So I my suggestion would be maybe not requiring notification but encouraging notification either through email website

the idea of a no fee permit you're still issuing a permit you're not charging for it so somebody in the town will know uh ideally in my mind we should have somebody retained that is an arborist we don't want a full-time arburist we don't need another full-time employee in stuff. Um, but if you can retain somebody with the tree knowledge that you can get them for 8 hours a week or something like that, that would be the way to go to deal with these questions about uh is it a protected tree or a uh I don't know.

So, are you saying in this we're still requiring a no fee tree permit for any pruning or anything? anything that was large. Uh eight inches of the certain size that you know he's gonna fix this all up. I just don't Yeah.

Good idea. By the way, what's that? A no fee permit. We want people coming to you. Yeah. To apply for permits. So, we get down here to 7733 non-conforming lots. And I read through that and I noted before any work or development. Is there any inventory of the tree that the town ha I mean the town has? Does the town know that I know of it would be a good idea to have a tree in my I I'm a tree lover. So, uh how do we have the resources to do that? Do we have the systems to do that? Mr. Can I say something? Caroline, please.

I I thought that the storm water committee told us they did a tree survey. I don't know what it entailed in terms of its scope, but uh that they did one. Um Okay. Melody is your recollection. I don't remember. Uh, not we'll check with the storm water equity.

Just as an aside to that, I've reached out to there's a program run by the South Carolina Forestry Department or whatever it is that I've reached out to um, now that I can represent the town. They have a had a program now they may not have any money anymore that they usually assign in the fall where they will do an aerial canopy survey. They can do reinventories and things like that. Um, I'm on the list that if they get money again, they'll they'll let me know and I'll let whoever knows and needs to know in town to apply for that because my friend's a mayor up at Brier Cliff, he he showed me what what they did is just amazing. You know, the the survey that they had for Brier Cliff, it would be wonderful to have here.

Okay. Um and then I'll move to 17735. It says well situated photographs, aerrow photos, survey plants and designs and inventory plans shall be taken of the lot trees before construction commences to document the site tree can be tree species and tree health before development scale and provided. So it says that this in applications it should be uh attached or accompanying to that but I mean nowhere here do I still see that's being saying it needs to be provided. Oh you know you're you're you know I'm putting I was putting things together and sometimes I didn't connect it. Okay cool.

And uh TPZ what does that stand for? Uh three protection zone. Well, that's probably a typo. Let me see where Well, you just kind of abbreviated it and I believe it is true protection, but I don't believe that was defined. Okay. I I I'm drawing a blank on it. Right.

And then uh 17741 fines. I I like charts and visuals much more than all that language and I understand that you probably did it that way because you're pulling it over and uh I understand that there and I appreciate it. But uh I prefer to see fines in a chart myself. So I can't see that. So

I figured there'd be a lot of uh discussion once it got to that point. And then uh we talked a little bit about a tree bank fund and tree fund. I think if we were moving to recommend this as well. We don't currently have that fund. So I believe we would have to send a recommendation to create that fund as well. There is a a town in in the north side um I think it's North Myrtle Beach that has a tree fund that's you know when they have tree fines or or fees it goes into there but you can also make donations to the and that's supposedly used for putting trees in right away or public spaces and things like that. So I you know take a look at it on the internet. It's pretty cool.

Oh I like the idea. That's just uh we need to do it properly. So, it would be a recommendation from the body as well to align that with the tree proposal. All right. Uh that's all I have. Anybody else that comments around the tree preservation ordinance proposal? Mr. Chairman Carol,

I I do have a comment and um I think it's something we need to um uh decide tonight. So what I heard Mark say is that he would um spend uh his uh initial time uh assisting us with drafting on the overlay and trees would become you know sometime later in uh the timeline. Is that what we want? Uh uh do we have a sufficiently uh enforcable tree ordinance right now that we could skate along until uh uh Mark had time to get to trees? Or do we have enough of a tree problem right now that trees should leapfrog over overlay and become the top priority?

Can I make it? What was yours? If you want the old the existing tree ordinance I think can be enforced. It just has to be enforced. I think it can control everything until this new ordinance that you know is uh is accepted. But um all and it sounds like he's already enforcing it. So and and that and that might which we haven't had before. I I get that and that may be very good. It's just that the tree step came to us sort of hair on fire

kind of approach. And um I think there's been some irritation that we haven't um sped it along. Uh and uh but if we don't need to speed it along and we need a more u uh thorough look at things and it should happen after overlay, I'm fine with that. I just would like to hear that. Yeah, I'm gonna add they're okay for trees.

I'm gonna I'm gonna add that too. So, Mark, do you believe there anything that this body can do currently to strengthen or make sure that we're able to protect our trees currently? And I know you mentioned you have reviewed our existing ordinance. So, do you feel like it's able to be enforced in a good tree plan for the current time until we get a new proposal? I do. It's enforcable.

Okay. Good. Good. Glad to hear that. Um so then my second comment is that the um way we are currently looking at uh trees uh is that we are setting up another group of grandfathered or nonconforming properties. And I just think that's a recipe for disaster. Uh because that means there are that many more uh lots within Surfside that will have to get the grandfather stamp on them until something else happens. And so we're going to have to keep track of that, right? And that seems like maybe we shouldn't uh be approaching it from that angle.

Run into that.

Not fully. Not fully understanding the non-conforming lot versus a conforming lot issue in a tree ordinance. I've never seen before. So I want a chance. Like I said, I haven't done a deep dive on this yet. I need to look at that and say, why are we differentiating between legal legal non-conforming laws and conforming laws? Everybody has to play by the by the code. You you don't get a pass because you're legal non-conforming. You meaning that it's small, they still have to comply. So, the tree ordinance applies to a parcel whether you have a 6,000 foot lot or a 12,000 foot lot. The rules are the same. They're applied the same to both. So, if some Like I said, give me time,

okay? I don't have an answer for you. I I'm always going to be honest with you. When I don't know something, I'm going to tell you I don't know that whole conforming lot, non-conforming lot issue because I've never seen that addressed ever in a tree preservation or Oh, I I invented that. Oh, there's I'll tell you I I believe it. I

I think the storm water committ could be, but my view of the non-conforming lot, and there are many, and I think depending how it's written, my lot might be conforming or nonconforming, for instance. But there are people here like my neighbor right next to me has a huge lot, not a single tree on his property. They've lived in it for since there were dirt roads. Okay. So, I don't think we should do anything about that person. I mean, we can,

as I said before, offer a carrot instead of a stick to get them to maybe consider putting some trees on that lot. I think it would help his lot tremendously, help him with his storm water issue because he floods. Um, and so that's why I wanted to protect the these older long-term owners from being beaten by by new regulations and forced to to plant trees. He's he's legal non-conforming because he's taken all the trees out. In other words, when he did it, we are sued. We assume we didn't break the law. We cleared this parcel. Now, we can't reach back now. We can't reach back at time and go, "Oh, no. We want you to put some trees here,

right?" No. That's not the way you do code enforcement. You say, "Some trees." And guess what? We have a tree fund. And how would you feel if we planted two live oaks on your Yeah, we have a tree fund. We go out and buy a tree. We're going to plant them for you. We're going to We're even going to plant them on your property. You're going to tell us that's the way you do. Does this sound familiar? Isn't this what I suggested? That's exactly what I suggested about a month ago. Yeah, that's the way. People didn't like it, but that's the way you go about reforesting. You try to get the people who are in non I'll call it in non-compliance comply. How do you do that? By beating them over the head.

Offer them something. I just don't want to call them non-compliant because they're legal. They they're they are uh they are property owners who just at this time don't have as many trees as if you went out and you were doing redevelopment on a lot. We're going to require that you either uh

preserve or add to the lot. So, so to me, we shouldn't be drawing distinctions there. We should just be saying if you're going to develop a lot um either in whole or in part that uh certain things be done to preserve the trees or replace the trees uh if that's the more appropriate uh uh route. But that yes, as Larry suggested that we encourage people to not just plant trees, but to landscape bare soils or, you know, soils that are uh a storm water problem. And um I'm hearing you say that that's a different

Yeah. Uh uh aspect to regulating. When

I said I've never seen that that description of it. I know how to I know how to write that language in there. It doesn't say leave. just says, you know, this age and it's no trees, then there's going to be an incentive provided for you to to to plant trees or to acknowledge that the town can plant trees on your property or the storm water committee can plant trees on your property. I mean, there's all kinds of ways to get people the horse to drink the water. Um, it's just got to be done creatively,

okay? Again, it's got to be something that we all we and the council all have to buy into because in order to entice, we have to offer a carrot and sometimes the negotiation of what the carrot is. So I I do think the whole town has bought into trees and if through nothing else than the the comprehensive plan which is a lot written about um controlling erosion, controlling storm water, controlling those things. And so um you know maybe without mentioning trees and landscaping in the same uh sentence, that's really what it's about. And uh we should all be on board uh for um for that uh to anyway I I'm glad to hear that we can do overlay first and then move uh to um trees.

Thank you. Did you have something? All right. Um one last comment for me. Mark, um, what what town would you say was your best tree ordinance or one that you think you may pull from? Either or Hollywood and that's South Carolina. Yes. Okay. Thank you. I remember when I first time I heard Hollywood, I went, "What?" Florida. Hollywood West Florida

and I just want to mention also I mean yeah I understand the priority and the design overlay we've worked on a lot of stuff for a very long time I could tell you in the first three years of the planning commission that I worked with a lot of talking and a lot of discussion but we didn't have no action I really personally don't want to proceed that in the future I would rather have action and if it's separating those and giving priority on something let's get it done move it get it done move it I don't see any problem while discussing something that while we're still modifying an ordinance absolutely the discussion still continues that way you're ready and ready to proceed to the next topic but I would also mention that the storm water committee proposal was a very good ordinance uh there is a little rift uh council wants to see this tree proposal they feel like the existing uh ordinance may not be enforcable or uh good enough for us currently and uh I'm not to say that it ain't or it does, but uh council does have a little uh priority in wanting to see a new tree ordinance relative. So, if you can give them confidence that we currently have existing, uh tree ordinance that you can enforce, I I think that would be helpful for them. Um but uh I don't want to say the priority is not the tree ordinance because all of this is definitely a priority. It's been in work for many years. We've had a lot of gaps as you've already seen. Uh so, I'd like to definitely continue to move this forward.

Okay. Any other comments before we move on? All right. Next item is reschedule November meeting due to elections. We currently have a meeting scheduled November 4th. Um we can cancel it. We can uh move it. Uh I think the next Tuesday after that you have a council meeting. Totally up to you guys.

The um that too. I I run the uh I'm the pole clerk in this building. So, um, you know, the election will occur here and I will, if you have a meeting, I will not be to be there unless it starts after 9:30 at night. Yeah, we're not that. Yes. Just wanted to let y'all know and give you all a heads up. I mean, we don't have to determine a date or anything. I can call the meeting whenever, but

Oh, so you It's to be determined what the November if you have a preference. It just can't be November 11th because of course town council would have a meeting then. Um it would probably have to be further in the third week and of course Angie and Mark's uh schedule would be determined on that as well. So do do we have uh another meeting this month? Do we have a workshop this month?

Uh I have not had that discussion. I mean the third Thursday of the month is definitely open and I'm willing to do it if Mark and Angie is available. Uh I would definitely like to continue to see us doing it until we at least get a good pace into our work. I think workshops are very important to what we're doing. So it gives us a little more elements as Melody and others have said to uh discuss a particular uh element. So I'm open to it if you guys are. It's probably up to you. Mr. Chair. Yes ma'am. Well, we don't need to have one to have one. We need to make sure we have something specific that we need to work on. Yeah,

absolutely. Um well, what I'll do is I will check with uh Mark's progress uh on uh design overlay and if he has something to present at that time, uh we will call the meeting. If not, then uh we'll just start with our regular meeting. That satisfy everyone? All righty. Next item is public comments. Any public comments? I will agree. Yeah. Um first off, thank you for the approval and hearing me out tonight. Name and address. Oh, I'm sorry. Char County 65 know your trail fire department. Um

so again, thank you for hearing us out tonight and the approval for that. Really appreciate it. Uh, two other things just want to bring up that hopefully we can open some communic communication between the fire department and the planning commission and the new director. Uh, two things that were kind of talked about. I just want to hit on der lots. I know the fire chief and I have talked about it. Um, they're not in a fire code ordinance. So, it's it would be ideal for y'all is if we have a fire in a building and in previous communities he's worked in, they've set it up where they can't get their insurance check until they're making progress to do something. Because if we have a fire in a building, if someone's like, "Oh, well, who I'm just going to let it sit there." I have no desire to move back in. Now, it goes three, four, five years with a half burned down house just sitting there. And that's where I think some of the conversation may be beneficial. All parties involved. Um the other one is just um with tree ordinance again I'm I love trees uh but being a fires smart community maybe something not achieving fires smart community but looking into that and that's just uh placing a fire barricade we all know the urban wildland interface has hit us hard in the county um as we saw last year and we are prime also with sea ods we catch fire in those sea odos and it takes off like crazy we have a lot of wind driven fires so having a safety buffer against a property whether it be from mulch and other um beautifification means sometimes it's very imperative that when these fires start running in the grass we have a means to stop it and that might be something we could include in ordinance so just something to consider like I said I'd like to open up some conversation with that and maybe including more not that y'all haven't included us but be more active so thank you thank you

any other public comments all right we'll move on to commission comments go one by one or does nobody want to Carolyn, do you have anything?

I I do have something and I I was thinking maybe we would have a workshop on this since we weren't addressing it uh tonight. And that is the capital improvement program if we haven't dropped it. I uh even though our uh local ordinance is different than the state law, I think it behooves us to make a proposal to um town council. Um and I uh I sat uh through the town council meeting uh about the discussion of it and um my takeaway was that uh it was being viewed more as um a part of the budget process rather than part of the planning process. And I think we need to uh see if we can present it as a a planning process that I mean it's not completely divorced from the budget process but it is a more long range look at

at things and uh so that um uh we we go back to the drawing board and what I heard town council saying was give us a short list of things uh that are top priorities and so we can uh earmark funds, set aside funds, whatever uh so that we can undertake these projects uh going forward. I my other takeaway was we don't want to hear about projects that we already have in the works. we don't need to be told uh do this when we're already uh uh doing that and have budgeted monies for that and what have you. So I I would encourage us to come up with the uh short list and that we make it specifically capital improvements which in my mind is something different than um uh staffing issues or uh maintenance issues or things like that. It's it's an investment and I'm I know I'm harp on sidewalks all the time, but sidewalks is a capital investment item that we could uh we've covered in the comp plan. We've got uh dollar amounts there. We can say to town council, we recommend that every year you earmark so many dollars or so many uh feet of sidewalk to install uh in the town and that that be part of our planning. So

that something we uh uh have identified in the comp plan and that uh the town residents really would like to see and I'm sure visitors would like to see particularly as they see them dodging cars as they're walking around the neighborhoods. uh uh uh that that we just we put forward that and then the town council has that uh to um use for planning. Thank you Larry. Uh I I've had enough to say tonight

Scott. Yes. I'll use his time. Sorry. Great. I had five things and I wrote them down so that it doesn't go away. Um, one I think and this is what I was trying to remember. I appreciate what you said about pointing out what is the point of the law, what is the spirit of the law. Um, you can write laws and everybody has to go by the letter of the law, but what's the point of it? And I think we need to know what the point is and all agree to it. Is it beautifying the area? Is it keeping people in line? What is it? Um, number two, um, you're in a tough position. Um, Mr. Broer, Mark, can we call you Mark? I mean, this is more formal.

I'll be Mark.

Yeah. Okay. Um, you you won't please everybody on this commission or in general. I mean, this is a pretty tough town, so I wouldn't want to be in your spot. um you handled our gotcha questions quite well and that's probably because of your experience but um you know thank you for that uh in media and I was involved in media there's certain questions that you ask to put somebody on the spot and to put them in the corner and you handled it quite well. Um number four I thought I thought I was the only one who stayed up at night with this stuff. Um it's good to know that you know it's it's a challenge. This is a challenge and just even working with other people who have a different mindset is is challenging. So um but I I really appreciate your spirit and and these are all Paul right here. This is not about our meeting besides but you know this is your first meeting and it's great to meet you and I'm encouraged for the future. Um thank you for taking on this challenge and I hope you stick with it. Um, you know, we've we've had um we've had a history and I I hope that it it's not a uh revolving door and uh you know, we need somebody good who understands both sides of different issues and there's always two sides to an argument and um you know, but I think we all agree that we want to better this down as much as possible and uh be fair to each other and you know, um do what we need to do to uh

town uh family beach and continue to be good. So, thank you. Thank you, Scott. Alex, I'll keep it brief. It's very nice to meet you, Mark. Thanks for coming in. I think debate is the only way any different groups move forward. Y you accept a challenge and push back. That's how we all get better. And it comes from a place of honesty. I trust I don't think we all should have the same perspective and if we did that something wrong before we go. So uh if they means things are working. So thank you for being here. Appreciate you hanging in for three hours. Three hours. Mariana.

Yeah, I'll keep it brief too. I like everything I've heard tonight from there and I think we're we're in a good place. We've got a real good handle on what doesn't work. have a 13y old decor or supposed to work. We have a not that awful tree ordinance that that would work if it was forced to sacred and so on. But the only only key I have is an administrative one. I'm getting ready to come here tonight. If you want to print anything, I didn't have to. Would everybody staff and council members please date your papers?

I I have no idea. You know, I have to read the whole draft to figure out which one is the latest one. Let's let's try to have dates on everything, which really would be helpful in this. Thank me. Um, just very quickly, I think um what's his name? Josh Budro. Is that the guy who helped us do the something like that? The the Mr. Budro the one who helps us do the anyway.

One of the things that he said to us and that I have not forgotten is that um if you don't change anything then expect things to stay the same and and he was talking about in reference to the 707 corridor that was specifically what he was talking about and um I think you pretty much told us the same thing tonight. So that should hit our ears and and stick I think this time. Um and I too am thankful that you're here. I think honestly for the been on the planning commission for what years whatever it's um I can say that it's not the only time but one of the one of the few times that I've felt positive and hopeful and um kind of excited. So looking forward to what you the gu the leadership and guidance that you offer and getting to know you better and um to working together to to be a good commission and be a good thing for this town.

Thank you. Uh and I will finish it up. I'll try to be brief, but uh Captain Kelly, thank you uh for coming out tonight and giving us a presentation. I know it is new to the role of the planning commission. It's always been there. I I believe it just hasn't been uh procedurally uh implemented perfectly. Um one thing you did mention is the communication. Uh we've been speaking on that quite a bit. Uh, communication is key for us and that's what we relate to administration as well just for the fact if we don't know something is causing an issue with code enforcement or if we don't know something that people are complaining about that they can't build houses or anything, we can't sit here as a body and recommend changes or identify those issues. It has to come from administration. So, anytime that you have any type of concern, and I would love to see your list, uh, any type of list that the firehouse has that may conflict or, uh, causing y'all pain or anything like that. I think, uh, all the commissioners up here would be definitely willing to look at that and look through our ordinance to see how we can correct it. So really appreciate you coming out and uh giving in that that presentation and also the olive branch of communication that that's very important to us and hopefully everybody in administration as well. Uh capital investment or improvement program. Uh thank you for drawing it out. Uh I did not put it on this because I knew this meeting was going to go along with Mark being our first meeting and uh uh I have shared uh information with Mark around the capital investment program. There is a conflict with state law and local law. Currently, enacted local law is requiring us and shall require us to proceed with giving them a full complaint. However, that is, I don't know. Uh I think you said you were experiencing a little bit of creating that. Typically, it would be done in a comp plan in general and provided with that and hopefully in 10 years we implement that where they create that comp plan in line with that plan too. Uh

but at this moment it is required by the planning commission to produce something. So it ain't about if council wants it or not. I think we still still should do something and provide something to them.

Um thank you Mark. Uh I've met with you multiple times. We shared a lot of communication. Anytime you need any guidance from us, you're more than welcome to reach out. I don't represent my individual. you can tell where I separate my official email versus my uh residential and p private uh feedback. Uh but uh I will represent them as uh I do professionally and to their consensus and I don't want to wish anything of my feedback onto that as well. But um I'm sure if you reach out or have questions for any one of us, I'm sure we more than help you work through something. So, okay. Uh, but I do welcome you and I I definitely am very excited about what you can do for us for the next few years.

Um, I think that's about it. So, I'll get a mission a motion to adjurnn. Motion to adjurnn, Mr. Chairman. Got a motion by Carol to adjurnn. Do I have a second? I second. Scott second. Everyone agreeing say I. I. Anyone opposed say no. Made in a journal.