Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening. Time is 6 p.m. I'd like to call the meeting to order. I'd like to welcome everyone to the town of Leland Planning Board meeting. Please note that these proceedings, including any public comment, are being videotaped and live streamed. The public and media may also videotape these proceedings at any time. At this time, I would like to remind everyone to please place their cell phones on vibrate or turn them off so as not to disturb the business of tonight's meeting. If everyone would please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

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.

We'll move on to item three, the approval of the agenda. I believe that staff has an amendment to the agenda.

Yes, sir. We would like to amend the agenda by adding item 11.2, board member update to the agenda.

Okay. With that amendment, does anyone have any other amendments or problems with the agenda? If not, then I can take a motion to approve it.

I make a motion we approve the agenda as amended. Second. Seconded.

Thank you. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Motion carries. Item four, approval of minutes. That's the May 27th, 2025 meeting minutes. Does anyone have any amendments or corrections to the minutes? Seeing none, I would accept a motion to approve the minutes.

So moved.

Thank you. A second?

Second.

Thank you. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Thank you. Motion carries. We'll go on to item five, introduction of guests or speakers. Do we have any guests tonight?

Yes, sir. Thank you. Good evening. I did want to introduce Dr. Zach Bug with Kittleson and Associates. He'll be presenting in just a couple minutes an action item number seven. Thank you. Zach, thank you.

Mr. Carey, you can go ahead and move on to item number six.

Prior to the start of this meeting, you may come up and speak. When your name is called, please come up to the podium. If you have documents to present to the board, please give them to the police officer or town clerk. At the podium, please state your name and address. You may then make your statement. There's a three-minute time limit for public comments. You'll notice the countdown clock on the wall over to my left. As a reminder, everyone here listens to everything that was said. The board, however, will not answer or make comments on anything said during your statement. But please be assured that everyone listens to those comments. Do we have any public comment?

No, sir.

Okay, then we'll move on to seven. 7.1, conflict of interest. Does anyone have a conflict of interest or disclosure statement to be placed on the record?

No.

Seeing none, then we'd be ready to proceed.

Thanks again. Good evening. This first item on your agenda is consideration to make a recommendation for the adoption of our integrated mobility plan. This is a plan that we've been working on for a little over a year now. And we've had a great partnership with Kittleson and Associates and the project manager, Dr. Zach Bug. And so at this point, I'll turn it over to him and he'll go through some information about the project. And then when he's done, I'll wrap it up with some plan consistency and a recommendation for your motion. Okay. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Ben. Good evening to you all. My name is Zach bug. I'm an engineer with Kittleson and associates. We're a local transportation consultant. We were the lead consultant on the team preparing the integrated mobility plan over the past year or so. Do want to give a quick acknowledgement to our teaming partners, RS and H engineering and smart moves consulting. So this is the first ever that I know of integrated mobility plan that the town has ever undertaken. It's basically a comprehensive transportation plan, and I work in the planning field. My background is in transportation engineering specifically, but as communities become larger and larger, it becomes really necessary to put together a plan for transportation to make sure that everything is consistent and that there's really a plan for implementation. So that was really a key intended outcome of this project was not to just do another plan, but to prepare an implementable list of projects that can be built, funded, and so on and so forth. So just to give you a few bullet points on the project overview, build upon land use and transportation plans. About the last 15, 20 years, we looked at about 16 plans or so. So we really wanted to establish that vision for transportation in Leland. This is building off of the, as you all may remember, the safety action plan that was just completed. We had the same project team for that as well, so had a lot of consistency. And then we're looking about 25 years into the future. Doesn't mean that everything in this plan is gonna take 25 years to build. We really hope that there's a lot of near-term improvements that can come out of this. So just briefly over the project schedule, we had a couple of planning board members that were heavily involved in production of this plan, served on the focus group for the integrated mobility plan, so this will just be a refresher for them. This kicked off last June, and we held two rounds of public engagement with an open house here in Town Hall. Those were in October and in March. We submitted our draft final deliverables in May, and those were all revised and approved by our town project management team. I think somebody mentioned earlier there's a pretty thick packet for tonight. If that includes all the appendices of the Integrated Mobility Plan, you're going to have a pretty thick document. But what we really wanted to do was put together a much thinner document called the Executive Summary that concisely recaps all of the data, methodology, assumption, public involvement, as well as the recommendations. Hopefully that's a lot more digestible and a lot lighter. We want that to be a public-facing document so that you can go out to your constituents and be able to explain to them how their feedback was incorporated, how all the transportation data was incorporated, and how we have a plan for implementation. The appendices are much longer. They include all the nuts and bolts of what went into the plan, including all the detailed public engagement feedback, all of the transportation data and numbers, and all of the detailed methodology. We really want for this to be repeatable, as I'll get to at the end of the presentation here. So hopefully the goal is with all of these appendices and all this technical documentation that another team in about five, ten years can go through and repeat the process and update the plan. So I just kind of want to go through the goals and objectives as well as the overall process. Again, we started about 20 years ago or so, 2006. We did a look back that far to identify projects from those transportation plans. We did a little bit of an existing conditions analysis that was predominantly based on that plan review. We wanted to update that and refresh that based on all of the completed transportation projects that have been in the works here, add those projects to the project list based on public feedback from those two open house events and all the online engagement, and then standardize a quantitative assessment to prioritize those projects. This way you're avoiding the quote-unquote earmarking, kind of that influence there. We want it to be data-driven. That's what we heard from our project team over at the town. And so this gives you kind of a number one to number 150 of the list of things to work on and implement. We wanted to have a high priority list of recommendations that address safety and mobility for all users. And then use the community feedback throughout the plan to finalize that method and the recommendations list. So I won't go through all the plans that were included, but I think we heard pretty early on that the town has done a lot of planning and there's an appetite from the public to see doing. And transportation projects take a long time to build because of the cost, so we understand that. I think that this is a very timely time to be doing a plan like this that's really focused on implementation. So we grabbed a lot of plans, 16 ongoing or recently completed ones. We looked at all of the transportation related projects from those plans and consolidated them into a master list. We also looked at NCDOT being ownership of a lot of roads within the town and looked at their program project list just to make sure that we had that up to date. And that resulted in over 300 candidate projects. And that is a lot of projects. I work in regional planning for MPOs that are as many as three, four counties large. They only have 500 or so projects, you know, in a four or five county area typically. So a lot of growth here, as you all know, a lot of transportation needs. And so we found just from those plans that there were 300 projects recommended that had not yet been built. We then did a bit of a screening, so a filter if you will, because within the amount of time frame that we were working at and the resources that we had, thoroughly evaluating 300 projects was not really gonna be doable. We wanted to kind of get that down to a manageable list so that we could start to, get meaningful community feedback, get data that were reliable and accurate. So we then divided those 300 projects into different modes, whether they were roadway safety and capacity improvements, whether they were pedestrian mode or bicycle mode. And then we did that screening we filtered out if there was a plan let's say back in 2009 that said okay Here's our highest priority projects and then here's our lowest priority projects. We said let's just go ahead and filter out the low We don't want to repeat what's already been done. Let's focus on the high stuff that hasn't already been built out and So we did that first. We added some new projects from the focus group that consisted of folks from the MPO, planning board, town council. We had some other local elected officials. So we had their input, which was very valuable. We also had public input, and this wasn't a situation where somebody comes up to a public meeting and says, I need a speed bump in front of my street, and that's what we put into the plan. It took a lot more planning and engineering judgment than just that, but we wanted people to have an opportunity to vocalize if they saw a problem that needed addressing. We then wanted to remove overlapping or inactive projects that just really didn't make sense anymore. We had that Safe Streets and Roads for All Safety Action Plan that was completed in parallel with this as part of a different effort. We wanted to make sure those were first and foremost. And that got us down to exactly 150 candidate projects for evaluation. After that, we went through a pretty tedious scoring exercise to evaluate each of these projects based on safety, whether it was including on something called the high injury network, where fatal and serious injury crashes could likely or have historically occurred. We looked at environmental resiliency, which is a huge component in this area. We looked at fairness, just to make sure that we were not concentrating all the investment on a particular neighborhood or a particular community within the town. Bicycle level of traffic stress, roadway connectivity and points of interest connectivity, this is all about network. This is not just, getting someone who's in a single occupancy car from one end of town to the other. We want to make it connected so that if somebody is walking or biking, maybe carpooling, if they're not just in a single occupancy vehicle, making sure they can get from place to place safely. A few other scoring categories that I'd say were less prominent within the plan but also important, you'll just see these listed here. So with all that, we went through this detailed scoring exercise, and you can see all of that in the appendix if you so desire. What that resulted in is we had a maximum of 52 possible points. The actual scores, the highest that any project got, which was on US 17, got up to 41 points. But we said that a score of 25 or higher, that was our cutoff for saying things above that or things at 25 or higher were considered high priority. And that ended up being 85 of the 150 projects. And you can see those broken down here. Some of them are crosswalk improvements, intersection safety and mobility improvements, new sidewalk, new trails, multi-use paths, and then roadway capacity and safety improvements kind of on a linear basis, getting you to all 85 high priority projects. If something was listed and not high priority, we wouldn't say that it's low priority because it made the initial screening and had public support, and so we decided to call those medium priority. and here's your master map here you can see everything that is in the different color coding differentiates what type of project it is going back to that table before so whether it's a crosswalk intersection new sidewalk new trail or roadway improvement we've also differentiated between the darker colors which are the high priority and then the lighter colors are more of that medium priority So all in all, 150 projects across the town limits. They have to at least touch part of the town limits to be considered to be within the study area. So we felt that we had a pretty broad picture here of transportation improvements for the next 2025 years. We've talked a lot about the location of the projects, but what actually is the recommendation? Well, for the transportation project development process, we're at the early planning stage. We're focused on identifying.

Excuse me, Mr. Book. Yes. I apologize. I just wanted to inform everyone. Do do. As you can tell, we are having a few technical difficulties. If the audio still persists, we will turn off the speakers for the microphone so that everyone can hear it and that it discontinues the cutting in and out. But that's if it persists. Just want to let you know.

Thank you. So early in the transportation project development process, we're focused a lot more on identifying what the need is and identifying what that overall project may be. And so you may have a need like a crash severity on Highway 17 and say there needs to be a project on Highway 17. And that is sometimes where we, as far as we can go, this early in the process. We are focused on getting funding for that, getting support from local elected officials and getting things in planning documents that moves on up the chain to the MPO and then eventually through DOT funding. So we're not at a level where we say, well, at this intersection, we need to change the signal timing to this and put in new lanes and new turn lanes, and it's going to fix everything. We're just not able to get to that level of detail at a long-range transportation plan like this. But we wanted to allow and invite the public to come and give us some feedback on those tools that are in our toolbox to address these needs. And so as part of that second open house, we really wanted to give folks a lot of different ideas about, okay, to solve transportation safety here, let's look at something like traffic calming, like speed bumps or something like that. Or maybe it's roundabouts. So really give folks an idea and an opportunity to reflect on those and say, well, I can really see this working in my community. Or, hey, maybe I'm not ready for this, or I don't think this is really going to work. So I had a lot of really valuable feedback through that engagement so that we were then able to go taking that feedback, taking the feedback from the focus group, and then using our engineering judgment to apply one or more of these treatments in our toolbox to each of those project types. so that later on down the road when the project becomes funded and it moves to a feasibility level and you can do alternative analysis and all that and get it designed, you have some tools at your disposal that have already kind of been vetted by the public. So let's get us into implementation. For each of the high and medium priority projects, we looked at two main sources of funding. One is through the DOT, Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan, and that's how they fund the majority of their projects. They have a prescriptive methodology that's also based on a lot of different scoring criteria, and it's meant to be data-driven and fair across the state. There's also direct attributable funding through the Wilmington Metropolitan Planning Organization, the WMPO, so they have a few of these grants. What we wanted to do was then go through all 150 of those projects and identify which of these funding sources is the most applicable to that project and is going to set it up for successful implementation. Also have a few federal, other state, local, and other funding sources. Not all of these may immediately be available to you, but it's something to think about. Again, five, ten years from now, we may have different funding sources, as we're seeing at the federal level, than we had in the last administration. want to make sure that we're thinking through all of the different funding sources that are out there, even at the local level, and giving you some guidance here to be able to fund your transportation projects. Just kind of going back to public engagement and wanted to just put this near the end of the presentation because we always, we really want to highlight just the level of engagement that we have with the community. So we initially kind of kicked off this project in parallel with that safety action plan, Safe Streets and Roads for All, which had an open house last July. We wanted to make sure we took any feedback from that and incorporated it here just because we don't want to ask people the same question twice. So while we had a captive audience, got some good feedback there. And then we had two rounds of project specific engagement, which were held in October. And then in February, we had an online comment map that i think had a lot of great participation it was just kind of a double click to leave your comment here help us identify transportation needs and then later on in the project when we had some of these draft project lists developed we were able to map all those out and give people a chance to comment and like those projects and say i really want to see this built We then had these in-person open house events and we were able to have that online comment map there present for folks who chose to attend in person so that they were getting the same experience as the virtual engagement and vice versa. And just to give you some numbers here, we had about 120 total comments on that map over the length of the project. We had a lot of responses to our two online surveys. So you can see there nearly 400 responses overall. And then I'd say a pretty good handful of very open, very open-minded and engaging folks that came to the open house events. So don't let the numbers fool you here. 16 to 21, as I said, I work on a lot of long-range transportation plans. It can be very difficult to get people interested in transportation over the next 20 to 25 years versus something that is kind of in the works. So again, I was pretty encouraged by the folks who were able to attend in person. JUST A FEW OTHER COMPONENTS TO KIND OF WRAP THINGS UP HERE. WE DID A POLICY ASSESSMENT OF THE TOWN CODE OF ORDINANCES AND THE POLICY FOCUSED PLANS THAT WERE MAYBE LESS OF, HEY, HERE'S A PROJECT WE NEED, MORE OF A, HEY, HERE'S A POLICY WE NEED, PROVIDED SOME FEEDBACK AND DIRECTION THERE. We focused on two focused areas and created some independent maps around the Gateway District out here by Town Hall, as well as Old Fayetteville Road near the school complex, North Brunswick High School and Landville Road. Those are really just inset maps, but we've been able to integrate those transportation recommendations and those project needs with the developing land uses in those areas. And then finally, we took a look at the draft typical cross sections which are underway. These are street sections that are, I believe, still under review internally by the town, but wanted to give an opportunity for those to be reviewed by our project team as well. Just to give you a sense of what these focus areas look like, here's the Gateway District right outside. So again, having those projects mapped out on those plans are within the focus district. And then focus area two over by the school complex, showing all the transportation projects there. I will not go through all of these in detail, but we have separated a map for every type of improvement. So as you flip through that executive summary, you'll see everything broken out. You can see the scores for the individual projects, what priority level they were. We didn't get into costs, detailed cost estimates, because those are kind of ever-changing with inflation. But again, want to help support that implementation. Intersection projects, you can see where the sidewalks were recommended. Multi-use paths, got a lot of those recommended throughout the town. And then roadway improvements, both new streets and capacity and safety improvements to existing roadways. So in terms of next steps, we'll be presenting with your recommendation at town council on July 17. And then after that, the next step is to start implementing these projects. And as I said earlier, the goal was to replicate this plan update this plan using the same process at a regular interval such as every five to 10 years. So with that, I'm happy to take any questions.

Any questions?

Thank you for your presentation. Appreciate it. I wanted to ask what kind of prioritization has been done between the categories of projects you have sidewalks, highway bikes. So how do they scale with the each other?

Yeah, great question. We started off the plan by really asking the residents and the focus group in terms of public engagement, what's your priority? How would you like to see things prioritized? And I'd say we got a lot of great feedback and a lot of emphasis on non-motorized transportation. It was very encouraging as somebody that works in transportation safety and planning. So I think the public would like to see those non motorized modes be higher prioritized in terms of how we we did the nuts and bolts and the actual list. We roughly did half of each mode within the high priority. And you can see that kind of in a we've got a little bit a little table up here. This kind of shows you which

yeah here we go so out of the crosswalk improvements 20 of them were considered high priority two of them were considered medium priority so much more emphasis on on the walking and i know you you didn't um take into account construction values just because it's it's it would just be a guess but i mean you're looking at depending on projects you know tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work I mean, if something is high on the safety score, but it's X amount of dollars, would that drop it down or it will still stay as a priority despite the expense?

Yeah, we did a little bit in the ranking of just general feasibility. And especially if something was going to have a adverse environmental impact, we gave it a lower score. So that's kind of how we incorporated cost at a little bit of a surrogate level.

Okay, thank you. And I guess this question is more for Ben than anybody else. But if the town council adopts this, how will this plan be used in terms of evaluating development projects as they come forward? Because I didn't notice one of the bullets was developer fees. And I know that North Carolina, there's a lot of restrictions as to what the town can ask and not ask for. How will those projects be evaluated against the priorities that the town council hopefully will adopt this plan.

Yeah, another good question. So as we're looking at a project's traffic impact analysis, that provides an opportunity to sort of dovetail some recommendations from this plan that maybe are commiserate with the offsetting the impacts of the transportation demand for a particular project.

Thank you, Ben. Appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'm going to follow up once on that. I had the same question on developer fees, Mr. Andrea. Is there a difference between developer fees and a condition to the developer to have to do something in conjunction with? Because I think developer fees have been an issue in the past, but how about the ability to sit back and say, as part of this, you must do a crosswalk or whatever?

Yeah, there certainly is a difference, and I'm not sure what context developer fees we're referencing here, but a development essentially has, to a degree, an obligation to offset their impacts to the community, whether that's to the roadway system or to... fulfill the needs of the users of the community in terms of pedestrian or bicycle facilities. We have to make sure that we're not asking a development project to do something that's unreasonable as far as whether that be too far away from their project or something that might not have a rational nexus to the impact of their project. So there is a difference, but the trigger to sort of get the development to include some of these projects would be based on the scope of the development and what it is. Smaller development isn't going to have the same user demand and therefore is not going to require the same level of improvements that a larger development would.

Thank you. Other questions?

Yes, Mr. Whitney. Well, I think some of the projects have what would require capital from developers anyway. If they're building a road in a new development, they're also building sidewalks and other things. So it's not necessarily just the fees. It's the developer capital expenses. And it could make up a fairly large part of the cost. financing for these kinds of projects. Also, you know, we do have, Leland has some funny boundary situations as we went through the thing there. The county has some areas and the Belleville has some and state have others and so there's a process that needs to go forward in trying to bring forth some of these concepts that you have here to those various agencies as well. I think the MPO is somewhat of a clearinghouse for it, but there are things that, you know, like, for example, you have things along Mako Road, which is not in Leland, but it touches parts of Leland as it goes forward. But some of the improvements that are illustrated are actually not in Leland and not really part of, it cannot be part of the plan, but are part of the, because of the contingencies or the contiguous nature of some of the improvements, it's important that those kinds of concepts be shared with those municipalities as well.

That's right. Thank you. Mr. Brew.

I think you'd probably be as good of a source as I had a question recently come up. I was visiting Charleston, and for anyone who's visited Charleston, traffic there is fun, to say the least. But it's not that dissimilar from some of the issues that we see on 17 and being a suburb of Wilmington. Leland has undergone a massive fundamental shift from what it was 30 years ago. And I'm curious what you guys see as feasible with the projection that by 2045 we want to be roughly four times bigger than we currently are. How does your plan statistically account for making shifts to roadways and property that is already existing?

Yeah, there was a that's a great question. So there is a fair amount of what would say planning for growth when it comes to how we put the plan together. It was number one, based off of a lot of recently completed plans that incorporated land use and development and all of that, the projections for that. So we wanted to make sure we're not just looking through a snapshot of what's going on today, but what could be happening in the future. The next piece of it is, I think we really wanted to come up with some projects that were resilient and provided for that future safety for that future multimodal accommodation traffic accommodation as well so that we're not just building something and then it's going to be obsolete five ten years from now other questions mr andrea you had you wanted to go forward yeah thanks

So the completion of this plan fulfilled some direct implementation of our 2045 plan, talking about one, updating and consolidating our plans that we have already, but also evaluating the different needs and not prioritizing one mode of transportation over the other. So just a little context of how the, this, how this plan is supported by the 2045 plan. Just a couple other notes on the implementation of this that I thought are worth mentioning is we talked a lot about how the developers could play a role in these projects becoming a reality, but this plan also will help to inform the capital improvement planning at the local level and when we talk about the budget each fiscal year and deciding you know what portion of the budget can go to capital improvement projects this plan will help with that this plan will also help inform the regional and state transportation improvement program so some of these projects were already submitted as part of the 2050 mtp which is just wrapping up from the wmpo and then those projects sort of compete regionally to to become part of the state transportation improvement program So there's different elements of implementation that this plan will help inform. So I just thought that that would be prudent to mention. So this is the recommendation that staff has for you. We'll circle back to this in a second, but wanted to give opportunity for anyone from the public that may have spoke to speak. Do you know if anybody signed up?

We do not have anyone signed up for this talk.

Well, we'll breeze right through that then. No one signed up in support or opposition. So I'd be glad to answer any questions you have, but that is all that we had to present.

The only thing I'd like to say is I think that the amount of public input was extremely impressive. I mean, literally. Multiple ways for people, again, and I think when you looked at those numbers, it was very impressive. I also, before we vote, would mention that Mr. Whitney was heavily involved in this, and I would thank him from the board's perspective for all the work he did on that, too.

Other than that, any questions before we go to?

I have one question. Well, I'm always on this tangent about regional cooperation. So given the fact that regional cooperation is pretty much critical in this area, how much of a bearing do you think regional cooperation, plus or minus or what have you, will have on the implementation and provide a good outcome for this plan?

I think we're continuing to do a better and better job of working with our neighbors on that regional cooperation. I think a great example of that is the Gullah Geechee Heritage Trail. That recommended route is mentioned in this plan, but Leland can only go so far into making that whole project a reality. So we have to work through some synergy with other jurisdictions and with the NPO and with DOT to make these projects a reality. And that goes for other projects too. I think the Malmo Loop Road project was mentioned or any any project they may have some element that extends beyond the Town limits of the town of Leland So yeah, it certainly will be important to make sure that our plan or the projects in this plan that extend outside the boundaries are things that can be picked up and made a reality and And then sort of also on the other side of that, in leading up to the projects that were included in this plan, we looked at other plans from other jurisdictions to make sure that if they had projects that maybe terminated at Leland's boundary, that we wanted to make sure that that continued through so that project could be a reality.

Other questions? Seeing none, then I would accept a motion if anyone has one.

I would make the motion to approve staff's recommendation to recommend this to council for adoption.

We have a motion to approve. I have a second.

Second.

All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Move on then to action item eight. Again, 8.1, conflict of interest. Does anyone have a conflict of interest or disclosure statement to be placed on the record regarding this item?

No.

Seeing none, then we're ready to proceed.

Good evening, everyone. My name is Katie Livingston. I'm a planner one here with the town. Today I'm here to talk about a text amendment to section 66 four and section 66 162 of the permitted use table for model unit marketing centers. As we go forward, we should be thinking about does the proposed ordinance amendment align with and advance the goals and vision of the adopted plans? Does the proposed ordinance make sense? Is it logical? Is it in the best interest of residents, applicants, staff, and the natural and built environment? These amendments aim to tidy up some code and streamline a process developers are already going through, recombine, tidy up some code and streamline a process developers are already going through, recombining and subdividing lots to make it faster, simpler, and more logical. Planning board may of course approve, approve a modified version, deny, or postpone if more information is needed. As this definition is currently written here, it contains some regulatory language that is better suited for other areas of the code. To create continuity among our definition section, we want to ensure that the definition portion of our ordinance is strictly that, just definitions. And for simplicity's sake and continuity among that section 66-4, we'd like to remove some of that regulatory language. As of now, the existing language allows for only one marketing center within a development at a time. This can be difficult for larger or phased projects, and then it also just contains that regulatory language that would be better addressed somewhere else in the code. The newly proposed language is model unit marketing center means a temporary sales and marketing facility including model homes, manufactured homes, mobile homes, and group housing units located within a development project used for sales, showcase, and promotional services. This definition seeks to clear up the code by relocating those details and NOT HAVE ANY REGULATORY LANGUAGE THERE. THE SECOND TEXT AMENDMENT PROPOSED IS TO SECTION 66162 OF THE PERMITTED USE TABLE CURRENTLY developers have a desire for more temporary parking next to model unit marketing centers. And there is no allowance for temporary or separate parking lots on adjacent lots as things currently stand. So developers are recombining and subdividing lots and then resubdividing them and recombining them to create parking lots adjacent to their model unit marketing centers. All of that parking must meet permanent parking standards, even when temporary, which means curbs, stormwater, pavement markings, etc. And it is costly and inefficient for the town and for developers. Note 29 would add language for temporary parking lots for model homes on adjacent lots and it would appear in the permitted use table as note 29 as seen here on the right side. That regulatory language that the lots would be subject to would be one, parking facilities shall comply with all ADA requirements as outlined in the most recent version of North Carolina Building Code. Two, that they should have an approved means of ingress and egress to either an access easement or a right of way. They shall consist of concrete, asphalt or gravel or an alternate paving material as approved by staff. They should be of a minimum size 18 by nine feet in width. And they should be designed to ensure adequate maneuverability backing in and out of spaces. They should not be located on any lots that are approved as passive or active open space. And they are not required to meet residential minimum off-street parking requirements until they are converted to residential use. And they will not be allowed to convert to residential use until those standards are met. They're exempt from vertical curb requirements. They may not exceed the maximum BUA built upon area permitted by the applicable stormwater regulations. and they must be removed and the lot restored to a condition compliant with the applicable zoning district before its conversion to residential use. This language in whole supports temporary model home functions with more practical flexibility. It maintains accessibility, safety, and orderly development and avoids a redundant process of recombination and subdividing that is currently taking place. This text amendment supports the Leland 2045 future vision goals and plan themes of critical goal number 11, which is Leland uses smart, progressive planning that anticipates and stays ahead of growth. Staff recommends approval and I suggest the following motion. Motion to recommend council approve the proposed text amendment as presented by staff, finding that it is one, consistent with Leland 2045 strategy by creating predictable development and staying ahead of growth, and two, reasonable in the public interest to better align zoning regulations with market demand. I'll now open up to public comment.

Do we have anyone signed up?

No opposition, so we'll circle back to this.

Okay, questions? Yes, Mr. Pizarro.

That's okay, thank you for your presentation. I just wanted to understand why you eliminate, why is it proposed to eliminate the requirement that there only be one?

With larger and more phased subdivisions, often these developments will have more than one model unit at a time, not currently as the ordinance stands, but it is not staff's opinion that we would like to regulate how many they have at a time with the nature of how phased and how large some of these subdivisions can be. Often they'll have one sales center as well, and then another model unit marketing center will be used just as showcase.

I think I understand that answer.

There's also sometimes multiple builders as well. Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Other questions? I'm just trying to get a hand, I'm thinking of like the Del Webb and Mallory Creek, they have like six or eight homes along the street.

Well, and also.

And they were kind of done as a model home thing. Does that preclude that type of development or not? Or are you trying to identify something just for something smaller, smaller than that type of community?

I'm not sure I understand your question, but they would be, so for something like that as an ordinance currently stands somewhere like Mallory Creek that wants to have a model unit marketing center, then also needs parking to accommodate the patrons that come in. And they're taking a neighboring lot that has not yet been built upon and subdividing it in to then have parking onto that lot, which just creates a redundant process for staff and for the developer as well.

Another thing that's very common throughout the industry is the multiple builder scenario, where potentially there's not a one sales center, but there are multiple sales centers for different builders. And I would think that would be addressing part of this idea, too, would it not?

Yes.

I think it's also because a lot of the common issue with this, again, within that industry

street parking being banned within a lot of these existing developments and homes are already there if they have too much traffic within a given area that's correct as well so there is no off street parking within the town so it's another to wait a way to um keep people off of you know our right-of-ways from parking there as well i do have another question though do we have a definition of temporary um it is temporary until it is converted to residential use

Okay, so it could be one temporary becomes another temporary becomes another temporary though, right?

In theory.

Okay. i'm going to make an assumption since you mentioned storm water in here and we don't know how long temporary is that there will also be some way of looking at the drainage especially if we're talking about asphalt or concrete and how that drainage would work so it doesn't impact a neighboring yes engineering building inspections are all on the permit approval process for um temporary parking lots like this one and and so on and so forth so they'll be looking into all of that

piggyback I think where your thought was going and my question is kind of to enhance it is there an opportunity possibly to put a time limit or like a re-evaluation with that like a year or would those be allowed to be run indefinitely as a temporary we can absolutely take that directive

I'm not sure if this is working. I'll just be loud. I think the reality is that these won't be temporary forever. There's going to become a point where every home is sold in the neighborhood and they're going to need to sell that last one. So we kind of want to keep it open to provide that flexibility, but we do feel confident that it's not going to remain a model home forever. It eventually needs to be sold as a home.

Other questions? Seeing none, then does anyone have a motion?

I'll make a motion to approve the text amendment as presented.

We have a motion to approve. Is there a second? Second. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. Okay, that was item eight. We'll move on now to action item nine, I believe was yes. Again, conflict of interest. Does anyone have a conflict of interest or disclosure statement to place on the record on action item nine? Seeing none, and we can proceed.

Thanks, this is your last action item of the evening. This is a proposed amendment to the town's flood damage prevention ordinance. I realize I'm missing a word up there. This is similar to a zoning text amendment, but I just wanna mention that technically it's not a zoning text amendment, but it's a change to the flood damage prevention ordinance. So typically you see a slide like Ms. Livingston presented to you, give some guidance from 160D about ordinance amendments. In concept, those still apply, but the 160D language in this case doesn't specifically. Nonetheless, a little background on how we got to this point. After potential Tropical Cyclone 8 last fall, Town Council initiated a conversation about what we allow in flood hazard areas and how we allow development to occur or not occur. And so planning staff presented to them last November kind of a summary of those allowances. And we had with them a pretty good discussion about some potential changes that could be made. revisited that conversation back in February, at which time town council directed staff to move forward with this amendment, essentially making four changes to the allowances that we have in our flood damage prevention ordinance. Back in April, I presented a summary of those changes to you all, and so tonight we're following up with the actual action item for your consideration. Some of these slides you have seen before, but I do want to kind of revisit them just to help tell the story of what we're doing here. So this is an analysis that was done back around January. I don't think much has changed. This is residential structures that either exist or have been permitted in the A or AE special flood hazard areas, A or AE means 100-year flood zone. So we've got 155 in the town limits right now that are either existing or that are under construction in the 100-year flood hazard area. Similarly, in the shaded X, there are 131, shaded X is the 500-year flood hazard area. these homes in the shaded X are not subject to the flood damage prevention ordinance. Technically the shaded X is not considered a special flood hazard area by definition. It is a flood hazard area, but in the, in an ordinance, it typically refers to a special flood hazard area. And those are areas in the 100 year flood risk. 100 year risk means that there's a 1% chance in any given year that a flood would occur in the shaded X or the 500 year, that's a 0.2% chance in any given year that a flood would occur to a certain level. So in summary, there are four changes that this amendment would do. It would expand the applicability of the flood damage prevention ordinance from not just the 100-year flood risk areas, but also to include the 500-year flood risk areas. It would increase the freeboard requirement from two feet to four feet. I'm going to explain all these in more detail as we go through this. It limits the allowance for fill in these 100 and 500 year flood areas. And it limits density to two units per acre in these areas. So I'm gonna go through each of these one by one. So first off is expanding the applicability of these flood damage prevention ordinance regulations. This is a drawing of a 100-year floodplain. We have the channel in the middle, typically referred to as the floodway. Then as the creek or river sort of broadens out, you have the banks of the river that are prone to a flood, and then the flood fringe areas beyond that. The area in blue there, that's the lighter blue, that's considered the flood depth, and in this case, it's the depth of the flood based on the 100-year flood. So that flood depth establishes the base flood elevation. We'll talk more about that in a minute. So right now the town's flood damage prevention ordinance is only applicable to areas in this risk zone, this 100 year floodplain or the 1% annual chance. This amendment would expand that to the 500 year. These 500 year areas are geographically not, don't include as much area typically as the 100 year. This is an excerpt from a flood insurance rate map And the blue area shows the 100 year risk or the A or AE. The yellow that you see that mostly follows those blue areas, that's the 500 year risk. So geographically, we're not talking about another significant area that's added to this, but it is adding a mapped area of flood risk that would be applicable to these regulations. The next change would be to increase the freeboard requirement. Currently in the 100-year risk areas, or the AE, a structure has to be elevated to what's known as the regulatory flood protection elevation. So the base flood elevation is the elevation that's established through the flood insurance rate mapping program. And those maps are adopted. So that's the reference to determine what the base flood elevation is. And again, that's the level of water that would likely occur based on a 100 year flood. The freeboard requirement is the requirement that is a locally established requirement. So currently ours is two feet. This amendment would change it to four feet. But when you take the base flood elevation plus the freeboard, that provides the regulatory flood protection elevation. So currently right now in the 100 year risk areas, a structure's first finished floor elevation has to be elevated to the base flood elevation plus the freeboard requirement of two feet. And that elevation can occur currently based on fill or some sort of structural support. The change in the ordinance that this would make in regards to freeboard would increase that freeboard up to four feet. So that means that the structure a new structure would have to be elevated to the base flood elevation plus four feet to the lowest finished floor elevation. So also important to note that when we're talking about elevations, we're not talking about the elevation based on the adjacent grade. So if a base flood elevation is nine feet and the freeboard is four feet, that doesn't mean that the house is 13 feet in the air. It means that the house is 13 feet above sea level elevation. The third change that this amendment would do is to limit fill. So fill is currently allowed to be used to either raise a structure up to the regulatory flood protection elevation. And that's typically only used for slab on grade construction. A developer will go in and fill a lot in order to make sure that the first finished floor reaches that certain elevation point. Or the other way that fill is used is to essentially change the elevation and or topography of a site so that that site could be petitioned to the town, to North Carolina Emergency Management and to FEMA to be removed from the flood zone. And that's done through this process called a letter of map revision based on fill or conditional lap, conditional letter of map revision based on fill. A lot of acronyms in the FEMA world. So that's a CLOMER F and a LOMER F. So this amendment would say that neither one of those are permissible anymore. The main concern about allowing fill is that when fill is placed, there's no study that is required to be done to understand what the effects of flooding on adjacent properties is based on that fill being placed. So it's a big question mark as far as what happens to downstream flooding effects, adjacent property flooding effects. And so that's really the main driver of eliminating the fill allowance. There are some exceptions of when fill could still be used. Those exceptions are listed here, A through D, primarily public improvements, utilities, things like that. And then the final change that would occur with this amendment is to limit density. And that density limitation would be two units an acre of the project's site that is within the 100 or 500 year flood or in that special flood hazard area or the shaded X zones. So to talk through that a little bit, let's pretend we have a project site. That's this big rectangle here. It's 100 acres. The zoning is R6. The allowable density in R6 is seven units an acre. That means within this rectangle, based on that density calculation, there's an allowable unit count of 700 units. We have our blue, which is our AE zone, and we have our yellow, which is our shaded X. Let's say that totals up to 10 acres of our project site. The density, the limit that would be imposed with this amendment is two units an acre in that colored area in the corner of the screen there. So in total, the total density calculation is pulled from the entire rectangle. You can still do 700 units within this rectangle, but you can only do 20 units in that colored area. You can do the rest of your units outside of that. So you're not getting penalized on density You're still able to pull density off those flood areas, flood risk areas. You just are limited to how many units you can develop in those areas. I'm going to stop there and ask if there are any questions over on anything I've gone over yet.

Mr. Brule.

I have two questions. The first one is on the fill item. is there not um so like when we when we design a when a developer designs an erosion control plan and uh storm water prevention plan for their project they're designed so that they're required to prevent water from going off site uh to prevent the down the downstream effect so to say, so to speak. Um, is there, is that, does that not, is the, is the feeling that with staff that that is not adequately addressing the need, the problem with the fill? I mean, it, Your explanation of why the fill was required, or why you got, and correct me if I'm wrong, is primarily because response was that people, the general public felt that they were worried that new developments were pushing water off-site. Is that something that the engineering field that has been designing these, I mean, did you guys talk to the engineers in the area to look at whether that was actually occurring? Because public perception versus reality are, in my experience thus far, pretty far apart.

It's my understanding and in my experience, I haven't seen an engineered study that demonstrates that there's no adverse effect to downstream flooding based on fill that's provided in a flood zone. So even though there may be an analysis of stormwater control based on erosion or sediment and erosion control plan or stormwater permit, that in my mind is you're controlling the the water and channeling it to your stormwater control devices. It's not necessarily the same thing as demonstrating that no water is going to leave the, it's not demonstrating that there's no adverse impact to downstream.

The fill requirement would only apply to areas that are within that 500 year zone.

The 100 and 500 year, right? Yeah, it wouldn't mean you can't put fill in the town of Leland anymore. It's just saying no more fill in those blue and yellow areas.

And then the other question I had on the fill was, would this also apply to things like septic system design? Because like mounded systems, we have a very high water table here, septic design for not so much major developers, because obviously most of them put in infrastructure, but small builders, usually cost-wise, they're kind of limited to put in a septic system. Would this impact them?

It's not written in a way that would allow a specific exclusion for septic, but there also are other requirements for new subdivisions to be on public utilities, and so I don't know that septic accommodations would be an issue within the town's jurisdiction.

Well, my question is not so much a subdivision necessarily, but this code would also apply to like a single home developer or a single home builder who buys a lot, let's say, or someone who buys a lot for themselves. Would this limit them or prevent them from being able to do like a mounted system?

As it's written, again, it doesn't provide an exclusion, but I think that's an easy add if that's something that's the consensus of the board.

Other questions?

Okay. So, round and third here, some plan consistency. Some of these elements were specifically mentioned in Leland 2045 in terms of increasing the town's resilience, doing a little bit of a better job of what we allow in development or as far as development in these flood risk areas and how we allow those developments to occur. So just some considerations as we're thinking about a recommendation here. Circle back to this in a moment here. Do we have anyone that signed up for this? No signups tonight. So with that, that concludes my presentation, and here's our recommendation for you.

Seeing no other discussion, I accept a motion.

So moved.

To accept as is?

As is. I think this is great at being proactive. Thank you.

Any second? I'll second.

Point of order, I guess. Do we have a discussion on this?

We could. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of your comment that you just made, too, but where you wanted to have a suggestion that they look at the septic aspect.

Yeah, that's why I asked. Is it just if we can request staff to look at any peripheral considerations to just, you know, in these areas, specifically either a septic or... detached garage, you know, that someone would have the ability if they need to for something to that effect.

Sure. You've given us some things to think about.

As a point of order, can we move that direction now or do we have to go back on this one since it was a motion? Second as is.

Staff would ask that you redact the original motion and then make a new motion with this amendment.

Motion is being taped. Chairman, can I just ask a quick question? Chris, I mean, who would build a septic field in the floodplain?

I mean, that just seems to me to be. Mr. Lazzaro, if you could speak into the microphone. I'm sorry. Thank you.

I mean, my question would be is who would build a septic field in a floodplain?

If it's allowed, I would say someone could. And so I guess that's the question. If you were to sit back and say in a 100 or 500 year flood plain, you're prohibited from using septic, that would be a different story. But Mr. Andrea, I don't believe there are those prohibitions, are there?

Not in the flood damage prevention ordinance as far as I remember. but there are some requirements from the utility providers that if you're within a certain distance of utilities that you are required to connect to those utilities, right?

I understand. Would you be willing to amend your motion to say that you would move that we accept this with the understanding that staff will add or at least look into the aspect of mounded septic systems in these floodplains.

I would agree to that.

I second that one.

Okay, that's second. We have a motion and a second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries.

Okay, thank you.

Item 10 is discussion topics. I don't believe we have any, but I open it up if there are any discussion topics. No, sir. Okay, we'll go on to item 11, and I believe we have to talk about the meeting location update.

Yes, sir. Good evening, everyone. Due to the upcoming remodeling of council chambers here in town hall, the planning board meetings will begin in July. It'll be held in the training room of Leland Fire Station 51, located off of Interstate 7476 at 1984 Popular Street. The meeting will remain at the same time, 6 p.m., and the town clerk's office will be available to you if you have any questions. Of course, with the next meeting, when I send out the agenda, I will add that address and give a reminder for that, and we'll also be sending out some other emails to help out. Anyone have any questions?

Any questions? Point two. Whether you know it or not, you're up, Ben.

Thanks. Just wanted to recognize and thank you, Mr. Berlin, for your couple years of service on the planning board here. It sounded like it was a surprise to you that tonight is your last meeting?

Yeah, I was not told that.

Right, it's the end of your term.

Yeah, I was not aware of a reapplication or any of that.

Okay, well, we'll look into that and make sure that you're aware of the next application opportunity. I'm sorry that this is a surprise for you, but nonetheless, thank you for your contributions and keep in touch.

I got a little addition to that. Town staff would like to update the board that Leland Town Council has reappointed three members of our current planning board for another term. Those that have been reappointed are Alan Carey, Barbara Eckenwald, and Cody Watkins. Due to an opening in the board, we will be welcoming a new member, Mike Panik, at the July meeting.

thank you item 12 staff board committee monthly reports thanks a couple highlights from the month of may we issued a total of 260 permits that included 56 new single-family detached homes 21 new town homes and two duplex units There were 2,400 inspections performed and the value of construction permitted was $21.5 million. Some transportation updates, sort of the theme of tonight it seems. The public comment period on the 2050 Wilmington MPO MTP is wrapping up on June 27th. So if you have any public comment on that or you know anybody that does, please encourage them to submit that. There's also a photo contest for the cover of the plan. So if you can take a great picture, it'll be on the cover of a plan for the next five years. We were contacted by UNC's Highway Safety Research Center about a potential grant application that they are pursuing for SS4A implementation. Seems like a pretty neat idea and we offered a letter of support. They wanted to include the town of Leland in a grant application. along with some other communities in North Carolina that have done Vision Zero or SS4A plans. And this group would essentially create a speed management plan for the town of Leland as part of the SS4A implementation. that speed management plan looking at how to reduce speeds and ultimately reduce injuries on the high injury networks that were identified in that plan. So we will wait to hear from them as to whether or not they were successful in that grant application, and then if so, we will be a participating partner in that. and then it was announced but i wanted to announce it again that the town just received 15 000 from the aarp community challenge grant to install eight audible crosswalk signals along village road at the intersection of north gate and lee drive so we're very appreciative of that those will be the first of their kind in the town of leland and a good thing for our community for people of all ages and all something for the record that is my understanding

that the application that was sent in by the grant team plus supporters was so awesome that we, the committee who normally looks at applications, didn't get a chance to look at it. They just sent it straight up to the headquarters. So that's a plus.

Well, we'll share that with that team. Thanks for sharing that. That's all I had. Thank you.

Any questions for Mr. Andrea? Okay, then we'll move on to item 13, adjournment. Do I have a motion to adjourn the meeting?

Yes. Just one thing, I apologize. Usually with new business, I wanted to, I guess all of us at home receive notice about reducing our water use. And I would be really interested in hearing from H2G H2 go and others about their long range planning what happens above ground affects what happens on the ground and what they're looking at in terms of resource planning sewer capacity, etc. There's a lot in the pipeline that potentially is a lot more with Jackie's Creek and I think it would be beneficial for the planning board as a whole to understand their planning and how they coordinate or collaborate with the town.

Sure. Let us reach out to them and see if we can get something lined up.

Actually, it would be great if they'd be willing to come speak to us at some point in time.

That was what I was envisioning. So someone from that organization coming and giving a presentation. And I think that would be good if they had a similar presentation to town council. But that's, of course, subject to if they're willing to do it. But we'll reach out and ask them. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Any other questions? Again, at the Cleveland Fire Station 51. Thank you.