Planning and Zoning - Regular Meeting

So, Thank you. ¶¶ Amen. ... ... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Amen.

Good evening. I would like to call the Planning Commission meeting to order, and I've asked for Mr. Howerton to provide the invocation for us, and I will conduct this in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Greg, can you turn me up? Thank you. All right, so Mr. Howerton will conduct the invocation and I will do the pledge. Please stand.

Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you that we could come and assemble tonight, Lord. And we thank you that you've given us safe travel here. We ask you to give us safe travel home tonight. Be with us and let us conduct this in accordance to our rules and regulations. And also, dear Lord, watch over us all as we do and make good decisions. These things we ask in Jesus' name. Amen.

in the principle of liberty and justice.

All right, before we get started this evening, if you will please place all your cell phones on silent. Give you a second to do that. The meeting will proceed as follows. I will read the item into the record. Staff will present an overview of each item. The commission will ask staff any questions that it may have. The applicant will then be called upon to speak to his or her request for a period of up to four minutes. And the citizens present would like, if they would like to speak, will have the same opportunity. Following the discussion, Planning Commission will make a recommendation for a rezoning item. County Council has the final decision-making authority on rezoning items, so please follow your item of interest through to County Council. The Planning Department can provide you with the dates for upcoming Land Use Committee and County Council meetings. Unruly and disrespectful conduct will not be tolerated. Attendees demonstrating unruly and disrespectful conduct will be escorted out of the meeting. Are there any updates or deferrals? No, ma'am. All right, thank you. First, we have on the agenda the approval of the minutes from April 28th, 2026. Do I have a motion?

Move to approve.

I have a motion by Ms. Hoover and a second by?

Second.

Mr. Howerton. All in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Hoover. All right. We have an request for rezoning and ordinance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regards to Anastacio Washington et al. for a plus or minus 0.69 acres portion of TMS number 016, dash zero zero dash zero five dash zero four nine plus or minus four point nine acres located on North Highway 52 in the vicinity of Saint Stevens from the agricultural flex one district to the rural neighborhood commercial RNC district in Council District seven.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, the applicant is seeking a rezoning from Flex 1 to the RNC. The property, the landowner is seeking to rezone to facilitate the operation of a proposed convenience store on the .69 acre portion of the property shown in the illustration. Currently the property contains three mobile home units and one raised duplex style structure. It is unclear at this time whether the structure is vacant or currently being utilized as a dwelling or intended to be repurposed for the proposed convenience store use. They have not submitted a conceptual site plan at this point that would show the proposed layout, access, parking configuration, building placement, or overall manner in which the convenience store would be developed on the property. I would like to note that the zoning request was triggered by a zoning ordinance infraction as the landowner is currently operating the commercial use within a Flex 1 designated zoning district. This is the proposed subdivision plat that was submitted to us. And there is one RNC lot located approximately 1,800 feet from the lot in question that is also zoned RNC. This is the code case violation history. The property is not zoned for commercial use pending resolution for the rezoning. The convenience store is operating in a modular school building. No permits are on record for the electrical services. The adjacent lots are also zone flex one. The lot is located within the rural living designation of the future land use map. These are photos of the property and the photo to the right I believe is the building in question that is being used as part of the convenience store. Staff finds a request consistent with the intent of the comprehensive plan as proposed. Given the location of the proposed rezoning, staff finds it aligns with the intent of rural living and is consistent with the RNC district requirements and locational considerations. It should be noted that should the rezoning be approved, they would have to submit a development review application as well as a TIA application And I would also like to note that they would be required to show requirements for the required parking, access management, and the landscape buffer yards. There is a 20 foot wide required buffer yard that would be required along the roadway frontage in accordance with 10.3.4 of the ordinance. The applicant should also ensure that the proposed 0.69 acre lot is sufficient size and configuration to adequately accommodate all applicable zoning and developmental requirements, including setbacks, parking, stormwater considerations, and required buffer yards. Should this request be denied, they would be held to the Flex 1 standards, and should it be approved, they would be held to the RNC requirements and be allowed to pursue potential development of the subject parcel. Thank you.

Any questions for staff?

Madam Chairman, I have a question. In the past, we have, if someone was going in with RNC and it was not adjacent to other RNC or very, very close, we tried to steer it toward intersections. And in this case, it's not close to an intersection. Does staff feel like that that is an issue or not?

I think it was more or less that the area that it's located in is along like the Highway 52 corridor. Okay.

Any other questions for staff?

One quick question.

Mr. Blackwell?

Did you mention that there was no record of being connected to electrical service?

Yes, they did not apply for the correct permits or service. the lot with electrical. So that was discovered when code enforcement had gone out there.

How are they being served? I'm assuming they have electricity in the building.

I'm not able to speak to that, but the applicant might be able to.

Okay, thank you.

Any other questions for staff? Is the applicant here? If you'll please step to the podium, state your name and address for the record.

My name is Anastasia Washington. My address to that is 4494-058-52, St. Stephen, South Carolina. All right.

Did you have any, does the commission have any questions for the applicant?

Well, let's let him talk to us about what his plans are for this development.

Pretty much just trying to put my local convenience store and a barbershop for the community. Just something pretty local and convenient for them.

Do you currently have electrical service there?

Not at the moment. My meter was pulled. So I had electric service there. but they told me that I couldn't operate until I had proper permitting.

Okay, you had run electrical service from one of the other?

No, it has its own meter box.

Oh, it had it on, okay.

Yeah, yes, sir.

Any other questions for the applicant?

No.

All right, do we have a motion? I'm sorry, you're right. Is there anyone here to speak for or against this application? All right, seeing none, is there a motion?

Motion to approve. Second.

We have a motion by Mr. Blackwell, a second by Ms. Moore. All in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? The ayes have it. Thank you. All right, next we have an ordinance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regards to Cynthia Ravenel for TMS number 096-00-00-015 plus or minus one acre located on Highway 311 in the vicinity of Cross from the Agricultural Flex 1 District to the Rural Neighborhood Commercial R&C District in Council District 7.

Thank you. This request is very similar to the prior request. They are seeking to rezone from Flex 1 to R&C. In this case, they are proposing a convenience store and a fireworks stand. The subject parcel is located along Highway 311, approximately half a mile northeast from the intersection of State Road 176. The subject parcel abuts the Dean's Swamp Conservation Tract held by the National Autobahn Society. The subject currently contains one residential dwelling. They have not submitted a detailed conceptual site plan or supporting developmental plan illustrating the proposed access, parking configuration, building placement, or overall manner in which they intend to develop the property. The nearest commercially zoned RNC property is located directly adjacent to the east of the subject property but contains no existing structures. They did provide this kind of conceptual layout where they just marked off where they were intending to improve, which is those improvements are in the already disturbed area of the lot. Adjacent zoning is also flex one. The future land use map is of rural living and conserved lands open space. And there is some FEMA flood towards the rear of the property. Staff finds a request consistent with the intent of the comprehensive plan as proposed. and that the RNC is compatible in the surrounding zoning context. Staff also recognizes that the parcel is located along Highway 311, an arterial roadway connecting to South Carolina 176 that experiences through traffic patterns more characteristic of a roadway corridor than an isolated rural roadway. The parcel is not served by public water or public sewer, so development intensity is limited to a rural commercial scale. It is worth noting that the residential density supportable within RNC aligns with the supported Flex 1. We did contact our floodplain manager to discuss this. She stated that because the parcel falls within a mapped floodplain without a floodway, any development within its boundaries would require a data study to prove that the base flood elevation would not be increased by more than one foot due to the improvements. Should the area contain wetlands, the applicant would be required to obtain necessary fill permits and stormwater authorizations. Staff makes a finding that the request aligns with the intent of the conserved land and open space future land use designation. Should this rezoning be approved, they as well would be required to submit a developmental site plan for review as well as an application for a TIA. Should this be denied, they would be held to the Flex 1 standards. Should it be approved, they would be held to the RNC requirements.

Any questions for staff?

Madam Chair, I have one. You talked about the wetlands here and the possibility that a wetlands mitigation may be necessary. Has that been discussed with the applicant? Are they aware of that?

I don't believe that was a discussion.

Okay. Thank you.

You're welcome. Any other questions for staff? Is the applicant here? If you'll please come to the podium and state your name and address for the record.

Good evening. My name is Robert Ravenel. I'm the son of Cynthia Ravenel. The address is 2834 Highway 311 across South Carolina, 29059. Pretty much self-explanatory address. It's already a building there. There's no structure as in a family home or residential home. The building that you guys actually see on the display, that's gonna be remodeled in due time, but there's no flooding or anything that's taken place at the property ever.

Okay, what they were talking about is if you develop something additional on that property, then there's got to be a study done to see if there's any impact to the wetlands and this. Yes, sir. That's major.

Yes, sir.

Okay.

I have a question. Is there an existing septic tank?

Yes, it was. Yes. Yes.

Is it working? Do you know?

Um, we haven't been on the property in a while, so I do know that I do need to look into that. But, um, but I know it is something out there.

Having an existing septic tank is probably a good thing.

Yes, ma'am.

Any other questions for the applicant? Is there anyone in the audience who would like to speak for or against this application? Hearing none. Do I have a motion?

Motion to approve. Second.

I have a motion from Mr. Blackwell, a second from Ms. Hoover. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right, the ayes have it. Thank you very much. All right, next we have an ordinance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regard to Tyler and Carmen Garrett survivorship for the TMS number 142-01-01-027 plus or minus 0.80 acres located on Panopolis Road and Themins Road in the vicinity of Panopolis from the General Commercial GC District to the Agricultural Flex One District and Council District Six.

Thank you Madam Chairwoman. So the applicant is seeking to down zone this parcel from GC to Flex 1. The subject parcel has an existing residential single-family dwelling on the property and they are seeking to rezone to better align with that existing use. So the subject parcel neighbors commercial, general commercial zone parcels along Pinopolis Road and Flex 1 parcels along Themins. Of course, these are the distinctives between general commercial and Flex 1 with the notable difference for the purpose of this application being that no single family dwelling housing types are permitted on general commercial zone parcels. So here is a picture of the subject parcel and a picture of Pineopolis Road from the subject parcel. So staff finds that the request conforms with the comprehensive plan and in particular the growth corridor and suburban communities feature land use designations and as a result As you can see, it is within growth corridor and suburban communities. And as a result, staff recommends approval. Now, of course, if denied, the applicant would remain held to general commercial. And if approved, the applicant would be able to be held to flex one standards. And that concludes my presentation.

Thank you. Any questions for staff? Is the applicant here? Yes. If you'll please step to the podium and state your name and address for the record.

Carmen and Tyler Garrett, 108 Thiemans Road, Moncks Corner, South Carolina, 29461.

Tell us a little bit about your project.

We just bought the property a month ago. We really didn't know it was commercial, and we're just trying to put our family there.

Any questions for the applicant?

All right.

Hearing none, do I have a motion? I have a motion by Ms. Moore to approve. I have a second by Ms. Hoover. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Thank you very much. You've got your approval. All right, next we have an ordinance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regard to Kevette Williams on behalf of K.R. Harvey et al. for TMS number, 193-00-02-031 plus or minus 3.86 acres located on Jedburg Road in the New Hope community vicinity from the Agricultural Flex 1 District to the Light Industrial LI District in Council District 7.

Thank you. Good evening, commissioners. To your instruction, I will simply add that this lot currently contains a single family home. The applicant is seeking this resigning to develop a 25,000 square foot warehouse to serve as storage for a business. The applicant has indicated to staff that although they don't have a specific tenant in mind yet, they are looking to attract a general commercial tenant such as a plumber. The applicant has already submitted a preliminary traffic study for this project and the county has determined that no further study is necessary given that the project is anticipated to produce a relatively low volume of peak hour trips and the full report is enclosed with the agenda. The applicant has also been made aware of their estimated contribution to the ongoing Jedburgh corridor study. They've already explored alternate accesses and interconnectivity options not through Jedburgh Road, though they were unable to secure these. A neighboring stakeholder provided an email noting concerns related to light industrial uses near their property, which is displayed here for convenience and has also been enclosed in the agenda packet-free review. Staff has relayed these concerns back to the applicant and they've responded they're willing to explore adjustments to their plan to help address some of these concerns. And as such, we've recently received two updated concept plans that are displayed here. If the applicant is called, when the applicant is called to the floor, they can use these to speak into their plans. This property neighbors flex one residential uses to the north and to the east and to the south and to the west, they are adjacent to heavy industrial warehouse uses. You can see in the map on the right, the highlighted parcel in the middle that is hemmed in by these two different uses of residential and heavy industrial. And in the future land use map shown here, you have a little bit more context and you can see the same parcel highlighted in the middle and it is located within the growth corridor with employment in purple to the left and in suburban communities in tan to the right. And these pictures show the existing conditions on site. There you can see the single family residence that already exists from it and the view from the Jedburgh Road. And these other pictures show the different uses. So the first image shows the view towards the heavy industrial portion and the next image shows a view towards the residential uses. Note that you can see some of the residential buildings picking up on the sides on figure four. But overall, this rezoning is consistent with the comprehensive plan as it would be within the growth corridor and near employment and suburban community designations. And because of that, we recommend approval because growth corridor seeks to concentrate development within its borders while aligning with ongoing corridor studies. In this case, the applicant has been made aware to align with the Jedburgh corridor study. And it would also be, this light industrial parcel would also be next to the employment district that is alongside it. So it would be compatible with the surrounding area.

All right, is that it? Yes. All right, thank you. Does anyone have any questions for staff?

I have one, Madam Chair. Yes, Mr. Blackwell. We have a handout here that shows the revised location. Can you kind of orient us on this map where the residential area is and where the other warehouses are or the commercial area?

I'll put it on the big screen. So to the north... would be the residential uses. So if you see the line in blue crossing the bottom, that's where the heavy industrial is. Heavy industrial to the south and to the west. But to the east, where it fronts the road, there's obviously the road, but there's also a residential parcel in the top right corner. But also the border up top is all residential.

So the building would be located adjacent to the property with the heavy industrial in it.

And the residential, yes. It is sandwiched between both of these.

No, but the blue line, if they're the same, then you said the blue line, the heavy industrial is to the south.

Yes.

So here the building would be located adjacent to.

Yes, now I understand your question. Yes, that's right. Thank you.

So now he has changed it so that the openings and the trucks would approach from the industrial side rather than from the residential side.

The applicant could speak better as to what the concept plan entails, but there's two different alternatives. Okay. Thank you.

All right, any other questions for staff? Being known as the applicant here, would you please come to the podium and state your name and address for the record?

Yes, it's Kivett Williams, 2701 Giverny Drive, Charlotte, North Carolina.

All right, if you'll just tell us a little bit about your project.

Yeah, we're planning a 15 to 25,000 foot metal industrial building, probably single tenant. and with approximately one acre lay down yard behind it for outdoor, for plumbing storage or lumber or whoever leases the space. And we just think that's the highest use right now. There's a lot of demand for the smaller 15,000 to 25,000 square feet of industrial. And then lay down yard is important, so.

Do we have any questions for the applicant? I have a question.

Talk to me about, this is adjacent to a neighborhood. There are a lot of people who have been living there for a long time.

Right.

And I want you to tell me what you plan to do to protect the people who are already there.

Yeah, that's a good question. So we started with a 25-foot buffer and a fence between us and their yard. We're trying to expand it to a 35 foot. We haven't done civil or survey yet, so I don't know about truck turnaround. And it's a pretty tight site, so I'm hoping we can keep our 35 foot setback. And then we flip the building so that the cars and trucks coming in wouldn't be on their side of the property, they'd be on the industrial side. I think that's what you mentioned.

Right, and that's definite, that is not possibly going to change.

There'd be no reason. We can see there's good signage to the road. So it's driven by the tenant, but there'd be no reason to put the building on the industrial side. And actually, this works better for traffic flow. I can't flip to the other one, but the other one had trucks coming in, taking a right and a left. So we feel this is just a better flow. So this would be the plan we would, it's the most efficient plan. So that would be what we would go with.

Well, I would like for you to not only think about efficiency, but think about the neighbors who are already there.

Sure. Now, I bring up efficiency just so you know that's not only for the neighbor, but it's just the best plan. So I'm confident we will go with this. And it could be a smaller building, 25, 100-foot depth is what's needed. But it could be a 15,000-square-foot building.

All right, and talk to me about the kind of fencing you're thinking of.

I think it's called, it calls for a wooden six-foot fence. It's what code calls for.

Okay.

I don't think you want a higher fence than that, but we'd be happy to explore.

And what's going to be the determining factor as to whether you have a 25 or 30 or 35 foot number?

Well, we wouldn't go 35, but the tenant. We want to do a single tenant, so just one tenant, and it'll be dependent on their size requirement.

So you're going to build to accommodate the tenant?

Yeah, don't pursue. Okay. Exactly, yeah.

Any other questions for the applicant? Okay, go ahead, Mr. Everidge.

Operational times, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, what?

No, I'm guessing five days a week, 8 to 5, 5.30. It'll be a business, industrial. It won't be a consumer. We won't be open until 9 o'clock with people shopping.

It's a little worrisome that it's probably and it's maybe in that kind of thing. At least I would like to know some perimeters for the hours. I'd like to know exactly what the buffer is going to be. I think that the people who are adjacent deserve every consideration possible. And I think that hours of operation and a buffer are are two things and you've done the change the orientation and that was good that was that was a good thing but i really would like to see you commit to some of these things instead of it being maybe okay

Height of the building? What is the height?

No, I don't know yet. It's very similar to the building on Jedburg and 26. Same engineer, same builder. I'm not sure what that height is.

One of the challenges for these style buildings that are adjacent to residential areas, when you get so high, the lights get high. Now the lights are popping into their property. And I'm sure you're going to have security lighting there, aren't you?

Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

That's something to consider, direction of your lighting.

For sure. And again, I like the building being backed up to the property so the lights go the other way. Versus.

Any other questions for the applicant? Ms. Moore, did you have?

Okay. Yeah.

All right, hearing none, is there anyone in the audience who would like to speak for or against this application? All right, seeing none, do we have a motion?

I'll make a motion to approve.

I have a motion by Mr. Sanders to approve. Do I have a second?

Second.

I have a second by Mr. Blackwell. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, the ayes have it, so thank you. Go ahead, yes.

Could I add that I would ask staff to please make county council aware of our concerns so that they are certainly addressed.

Hold on one moment. Ms. Hoover, I apologize for the conversation that's being held while you're trying to speak. If we could just be quiet while she addresses staff, and then we'll move on to the next agenda item.

I'd like for staff to make county council aware of our concerns so that during the process, these things that were vague could be nailed down. Yes, ma'am. So that would be taken care of before the final, so that it would be very clear exactly what the commitments are. Thank you.

All right, we have gotten through the first four items on the agenda, and we are going to take a quick break before we jump into item number five, which seems to be what everyone is here for. And it looks like that will be the one that takes the longest. If there's any chairs... All right, I can't speak over you. As we know, I have got a softer voice than most. So if there's any empty chairs, if we can allow everyone to squeeze in and maybe get some of the community members from the outside in, that would be nice to have as well. So we're going to take about a 10-minute break and let you guys get adjusted. Thank you.

so so Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. . . Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Thank you for watching. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. you

Thank you all. If you will all be patient with me, we have a lot to read in, or I have a lot to read into the record before we have staff presentation, and then we'll have the applicant present as well, and then I think we have a number of people who would like to speak to this item. So it may take us a little while to get through this, but if we all be patient and respectful for one another, we should make it through. All right, so we have a request for rezoning to the named TBD Plan Development Mixed Use Village PDMUV District And this is an ordinance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regards to Ben Gramling on behalf of Cane Bay Lakes LLC for TMS numbers 180-00-03-025 179-00-00-053, 179-00-00-054 plus or minus 56.66 acres portion of TMS number 179-00-00-036 180-0003-088 and 180-00-03-089 plus or minus 658.68 total acres located near Fairwinds Boulevard, Wapu Trace Lane, Marina Shores Court, Four Seasons Boulevard, Sunrunner Lane, and Granton Edge Lane in the vicinity of Monk's Corner from the Plan Development Mixed Use Assessment for Cane Bay Plantation PD-MU District to the named TBD Plan Development Mixed Use Village PD-MUV District in Council District 6. Item B is an ordinance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regards to Ben Gramling on behalf of BMG III LLC and JTG III LLC. and MRG LLC for TMS number 180-00-03-021 plus or minus 3.48 acres located on South Live Oak Drive in the vicinity of Moncks Corner. From the planned development mixed use assessment for Cane Bay Plantation PD-MU district to the named TMS PBD Plan Development, Mixed Use Village, PD-MUV, District and Council District 6. Item number C. is an ordinance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regards to Ben Gramling on behalf of Builders Capital LLC for a plus or minus 2.70 acre portion of TMS number 180-00-03-087 plus or minus 37.87 acres located near Radiant Blue Way and Calm Water Way in the vicinity of Monk's Corner from the planned development mixed use assessment for Cane Bay Plantation, PD-MU, district to the named TBD, planned development mixed use village, PD-MUV, district and council district six. Item number D, an accordance to murder, in accordance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regard to Ben Gramling on behalf of CBI Holdings LLC for TMS number 180-00-03-001 plus or minus 314.41 acres located on South Live Oak Drive, Pitt Road, Murphy Lane, Turbine Way and Black Tom Road in the vicinity of Monk's Corner from the planned development mixed use PD-MU district to the named TBD planned development mixed use village PD-MUV district in Council District 6. Item number E, an accordance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regards to Ben Gramling on behalf of Cane Bay Lakes LLC for TMS numbers 1-800-03-008 180-00-03-007, 180-00-03-006, 180-00-03-005, 1-80-00-03-004, 1-80-00-03-003, 1-80-00-03-085, 1-80-00-03-056, and 1-80-00-03-056. I'm sorry, 180-00-03-055 plus or minus 177.5 acres located on Pitt Road, Fairwinds Boulevard and Sun River Lane in the vicinity of Monk's Corner from the Agricultural Flex One District to the name TBD, Plan Development Mixed Use Village PDMUV District and Council District Six. Item number F, an accordance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regards to Ben Gramling on behalf of Cane Bay Lakes LLC for the TMS numbers 180-00-03-067, 180-00-03-080, and 180-00-03-079 plus or minus 22.69 total acres located near Rumelots Lane in the vicinity of Monk's Corner from the manufactured residential R2 district to the named TBD planned development mixed-use village PD-MUV district and council district six. Item number G, an accordance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regards to Ben Gramling on behalf of Daniels Lake LLC for TMS number 180-00-03-076 and 195-00-00-033 plus or minus 798.75 total acres located on Rumelot's Lane, Pinecrest Drive, Wynwood Lane, Harvest Road, Farewell Street, and McLaurin Avenue in the vicinity of Monk's Corner from the Agricultural Flex 1 District to the name TBD, Plan Development Mixed Use Village, PD-MUV District and Council District 6. Item number H, in accordance to modify the official zoning and development standard maps of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regard to Ben Gramling, on behalf of Daniels Lake LLC for TMS number 180-00-03-029, plus or minus 18.31 acres located on South Live Oak Drive and Rimmelots Lane in the vicinity of Moncks Corner from the General Commercial GC District to the named TBD, Plan Development Mixed Use Village, PD-MUV District in Council District 6. Item number I, an accord is to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regard to Ben Gramling on behalf of Daniels Lake LLC for TMS number, 1-800-0003-038 plus or minus 7.5 acres located on South Live Oak Drive in the vicinity of Monk's Corner from the Manufactured Residential R2 District to the named TBD Plan Development Mixed Use Village PDMUV District in Council District 6. Item number J, an accordance to modify the official zoning and development standard map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regard to Ben Gramling on behalf of HTC South Live Oak LLC for TMS numbers 180-00-01-004 and 161-00-01-057 plus or minus 13.87 total acres located near Murphy Lane in the vicinity of Monk's Corner from the Agricultural Flex 1 District to the named TBD Plan Development Mixed Use Village PD-MUV District in Council District 6. Item number K, an ordinance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regards to Ben Gramling on behalf of HTC South Live Oak LLC for TMS number 180-00-01-071. plus or minus 3.16 acres located on South Live Oak Drive in the vicinity of Monk's Corner from the Agricultural Flex 1 District and the Rural Neighborhood Commercial RNC District, respectively to the named TBD Plan Development Mixed Use Village PD MUV District in Council District 6. Item number L. An ordinance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regard to Ben Gramling on behalf of HTC South Live Oak LLC for TMS numbers 1800-01-041 180-00-01-049 and 180-00-01-048 plus or minus 7.2 total acres located on South Live Oak Drive and Oakley Road in the vicinity of Moncks Corner from the General Commercial GC District to the name TBD Plan Development Mixed Use Village PD MUV District and Council District 6. Item number M. An ordinance to modify the official zoning and development standards map of Berkeley County, South Carolina in regards to Ben Gramling on behalf of HTC South Live Oak LLC for TMS numbers 180-00-01-003 180-00-01-042 and 180-00-01-043 plus or minus 3.1 total acres located on South Live Oak Drive in the vicinity of Moncks Corner, the manufactured residential R2 district to the named TBD Plan Development Mixed Use Village, TDMUV District and Council District 6.

Thank you.

Can I ask you a question real quick?

Now that you've got everybody completely confused, how are we supposed to figure out who is what?

Okay, we are reading into the record items A through M for the same request, and staff is going to go over that.

Thank you.

You're very welcome.

Good evening members of the Planning Commission. The applicant is seeking to rezone a 2,000 acre assemblage of the subject parcels as proposed in the planned development mixed use district. The PD establishes the land development USE AND REGULATORY FRAMEWORK USING A FORUM-BASED CODE, WHICH THE APPLICANT WILL GO OVER IN THEIR PRESENTATION. THE PD WAS DESIGNED BY DPZ CODE DESIGN, THE URBAN DESIGN FIRM RESPONSIBLE FOR ION AND MOUNT PLEASANT AND HAPPERSHAM AND The proposal contemplates 55 dwelling units containing or consisting of single-family detached units, single-family attached units, as well as multi-family units and a variety of commercial, institutional, and other uses. The project is located in the vicinity of Cane Bay Plantation in the Wynwood community. and the applicant is submitting this PD with the intent of creating allowances for land use, form density and other dimensional standards. There are also two tables just to show the site assemblage by zoning district for the existing districts and the adjacent property information which contains the surrounding zoning districts as well as surrounding land uses. Shortly after the request was lifted through the large-scale development moratorium, the county embarked on a collaborative review which involved researching and discussing and consulting with other jurisdictions containing similar processes. projects and through the process the review went through multiple iterations and the. within the span of time of 18 months. This proposal, in addition to containing the PD text, also includes a definition section, an adapted version of Chapter 59, TIA concurrence documents, a vision statement, and a Cane Bay design standard and guidelines document. which will act as a village review board that will be created by the master developer to oversee design. And this diagram just shows you the multiple departments that were involved in the collaborative review process. As previously mentioned, the allowances is up to, takes into consideration or for 55, dwelling units and the TIA also contemplates approximately 250 square feet of commercial space. I just want to point out that at this time there is no regulatory or regulating documents that specify a commercial square footage cap. And as I previously mentioned, the PD will be utilizing form-based code, which again, the applicant will go over in greater detail. But I do have some exhibits of the various village zones that the applicant will be using and with the PD proposal. Also accompanying this PD tax is a development agreement, basically what stipulates the development, or excuse me, the developer's obligation to mitigate impacts, which is earned the review by the Berkeley County administration and legal, and is expected to be adopted concurrently with the rezoning proposal. AND THE FOLLOWING OBLIGATIONS MAY BE SUBJECT TO CHANGE AS THE DA IS FINALIZED. AND THEY INCLUDE TRAFFIC INFRASTRUCTURE, A $10 MILLION TRAFFIC INFRASTRUCTURE CONTRIBUTION REQUIRED Intersection improvements at US Highway 17 connections per the TIA, mandatory TIA updates required every five years and explicit timelines and triggers for external roadway connections. School support a $1,850 school development fee per dwelling unit to be paid with building permits and a reservation of a public school site that is intended to be conveyed to the Berkeley County School District at no cost and upon demonstration of readiness to construct the school and this reservation sunsets after 10 years. Emergency services, $500 emergency services fee to be assessed with each permitted dwelling unit and a reservation for a 2.5 acre emergency services facility site, again, to be conveyed to the county at no cost upon demonstration of the need for the facility and the reservation would also sunset at 10 years. Additional infrastructure and utilities, a reservation of a 25-foot utility easement corridor along the project's boundary for future county and sewer, or excuse me, county water and sewer expansion, and the reservation would again sunset after 10 years. The developer is responsible for any necessary upgrades to the water and sewer system, so to equip the project with utilities. As well as a residential improvement contribution structure, the developer and the county will jointly establish a RID that serves to generate long-term funding for public facilities and infrastructure. And lastly, attainable housing, a commitment from the developer to provide 50 micro units dispersed throughout the development and the framework is to be determined. In the way of considerations for open space, the PD proposes a nature overlay that is designated for undeveloped land to remain in its natural state. The natural, or excuse me, the nature overlay is intended to contain approximately 20% of the project area, and the overlay areas are situated or are proposed to be situated in the western and southern portions adjacent to the Cane Bay PD and the Wynwood community, as shown in the exhibit in green. Buffer yarding, adjacent parcel considerations. Instead of using the county's standard Article 17 buffer yard requirements, this PD contemplates utilizing a natural perimeter buffer, which will be 100 foot minimum, as well as buffer yard requirements waived in favor of natural transitions. In addition, lower intensity zones would be required along all edges and higher density and multifamily uses would be limited to interior zones. So with the combination of the 100 foot preserved natural or nature overlay, the edge only VSV1 zoning and the restriction of higher density uses to interior zones, it provides a required transition to neighboring rural R2 areas without applying a more traditional buffer yard or buffer yard widths. As it relates to transportation considerations, the existing and proposed public intersection improvements serving the development will be held to the chapter 59 land development and subdivision regulations of Berkeley County. In addition, three roadways within the PD are intended to be publicly maintained by the county. The spine road that will connect the project area to Fairwinds Boulevard. The northernmost access roadway with the connection from Highway 17 and the roadway that is proposed to provide access to the proposed public school site. In addition, a TIA was completed by Civil Engineering Consulting Services, dated November 2024. The TIA was reviewed by county staff and received concurrence from SCDOT in early 2025. The TIA contemplated 5,000 dwelling units roughly 250 square feet of commercial space, a public school, a fueling station with a convenience store, a nine-hole golf course, and seven baseball fields. The development intensity contemplated in the TIA is less than what is proposed within the PD. So in addition to the five-year update cycles, the TIA should be updated to upon the change of the development intensity. And the TIA framework within the regulating documents should explicitly state such. In addition to what I previously identified, the TIA necessitates making improvements to nine intersections. primarily along Highway 17, but there is also a proposed intersection improvement along Black Tom Road and Black Tom Extension as well. In addition, a contribution to the black time corridor improvements. And as noted, the TIA will be updated every five years and conclude on the 20th anniversary of the effective date of the development agreement. In addition to what was previously identified, the roadway design standards have explicit requirements for roadway interconnectivity and roadway design standards support bike and pedestrian modes of transportation, as well as roadway repairs resulting in utility HOA and master development. developer responsibilities. And here is an exhibit of what is contemplated for a neighborhood street within the PD. Regarding utilities, portable and sanitary sewer will be coordinated and dedicated by BCWS. And as previously mentioned, the developer has agreed to a 25 foot strip along the boundary of the assemblage for future expansion of utilities. BCWS utilities are permitted underneath travel or roadway travel ways and BEC has provided a letter of coordination. A storm water drainage report has been submitted, reviewed and accepted by the engineering department. And I just want to highlight that per the report, the upon consultation with the county engineer who is here and is able to speak, should that be requested, the detention facilities are designed to accommodate a hundred year storm event, which exceeds the county's current minimum standard. And as previously noted, the applicant has agreed upon the 2.5 acre parcel for future EMS facility, as well as the emergency services fee. And as it relates to the Berkeley County School District, here is just an excerpt of the coordination between the district administrators and the applicant basically stating that the developer agrees upon the school impact fee and the reservation of the public school site. And regarding transportation or transit services, the site is located along the tri-county bus route link B305 or 305, which provides transit access between multiple municipalities within the region. As per the applicant, the TIA addresses opportunities for multimodal transportation including transit supportive facilities through coordination with the tri-county link. And here is a map of the future land use designations. And as you can see, the PD is highlighted in this area right here. As it relates to conformance with the comprehensive plan, staff finds that the property is aligned with the mixed-use centers, Grove Corridor, and suburban community designations. And as it relates to staff recommendations, staff recommends approval subject to conditions and the conditions are identified as the following. Continue wordsmithing and refinement to ensure document clarity and account for feedback during the rezoning process as appropriate. Continue coordination with administration to finalize the draft DA for council's consideration. and to verify and ensure consistency of parcel acreage among the varying regulatory documents and establish a commercial square footage cap within the appropriate regulating documents. And lastly, since the TIA contemplates a lesser intensity than what is supported in the PD, staff finds that verbiage should be adopted to address those concerns to clarify intent, process, and applicability as identified below. As it relates to potential impacts, if the request was to be denied, the existing zoning districts will remain in effect for the subject assemblage and any development of the site will be subject to the current zoning allowances and the development standards. And if the request was to be approved, the applicant would be will obtain allowances to develop the property according to the intensity and density and otherwise what is identified within the PD tax. And that concludes my presentation. Thank you.

Does anyone have any questions for staff? All right, hearing none, is the applicant here?

He is.

All right, would you please move to the podium and state your name and address for the record?

My name is Ben Gramling. I live at 32 Charlotte Street, Charleston, South Carolina.

All right, Mr. Gramling, I understand you have a little bit of a presentation.

Yes, I'm joined today by Mark Cherry, who's our head of development, also James Thomas from Thomason Hutton Engineering, and Marina Corey from DPZ Land Planning, and she will be making the presentation. I just wanna say thank you for allowing us to present this. It's been an 18-month effort working with every single department of the county. It's been a difficult process for all of us, but a worthwhile process. I wanna point out one more thing is that we're really not talking about a new community here. We're talking about making an existing community better. The current plan is a down zone in density from what we currently have. Under our current plan, With what we have left in Cane Bay development is about 7,000 units plus what we've got by rights, another 2,500 units. So it's over 9,000 units. If we stayed with our current plan, that would be what we could legally do. Under this new plan, we're down zoning to 5,500 units, and that is a fact. And we're also adding commercial waterfront dining, places to sit by the water, get ice cream, eat, coffee shops, It's going to enhance the quality of life of most of the people in here, just about everybody in here. But anyway, I just would encourage you to really look at this plan. We're very proud of it. We've worked real hard with the staff, and I encourage you all to see it. And thank you for your time.

Thank you. And whoever's going to be doing your presentation, maybe you can help facilitate some of the questions the community may have.

Yes, hi. My name is Marina Corey. I'm with DPZ. I'm happy to be here. And I think there's a presentation. I'm going to thank you to staff for having presented a lot of what I thought I would have to present. So I think you've made my task a little easier. I want to start a little bit with a description of who we are. We're a firm that has been in operation since 1980. We're very proud of the projects we do. We have some in this area, but we work worldwide. And we work a lot for cities. very often helping them redo their zoning codes to enable the kinds of places that your comprehensive plans speak to. We also work for developers, but we don't do subdivisions. We create complete, compact, convivial communities, walkable communities. I've devoted my life to designing that. So we're very proud of the communities we design. And for those who are understandably fearful of what's coming this way, we encourage you to go look at our community and the communities on our website. Because I think you will take a lot of comfort in understanding how different they are to a lot of the other places that you see here. I will say that as I was visiting the site today and just in awe of the sheer size of it and the responsibility that comes with it, I am reminded that I want people to understand that what I'm going to speak to today, I actually live because I live in a DPZ community outside of Washington, D.C., very similar to the distance that this site is from Charleston. So it's about 30 minutes north of D.C., It is a community that happens to have about 5,500 units. We have about a million square feet of retail. It sits on 700 acres. We have raised our children there, and I love to see it function the way it was designed, which is really about community building with front porches so that you can get to know your neighbor's streets where people feel safe walking, open space that is accessible, lakes that are accessible, not in people's backyards, but in people's front yards at great cost to the developer. So I want to spend a little bit of time today just to walk you through what that looks like. Now, this may seem fuzzy, but we like to say we really believe that great places, yes, we design places that are economically successful, but also environmentally resilient, socially resilient, but it really is about creating a place that makes people happy, and our communities do that. We also happen to have an arm that is very much invested in innovations, initiatives that we develop through our work, whether it's helping people age in place gracefully. You know, the community, I live in Kentlands. We see generations of families moving there. And there are too few families that can afford to do that. So we've seen young kids move in, young adults starting their lives. They have kids. They encourage their parents to move that community. The kids go off to college. They downsize into the same community. That's very hard to do here. Too often, people have to leave the community they're in because there's only one size of home. And they're uprooted from their own community, their own friends that they have formed. So our communities really do enable housing, as much as the market will bear, yes, but for all stages of life. And I think that's very important. But we also believe very much in green by design is all about developing sustainably. Light imprint is about stormwater management, which is more and more important. Sprawl repair is how you repair the sprawl that we see everywhere. So a lot of, and I would say for this particular project, we have applied a lot of our light imprint, which is laying on the ground lightly. We began by designing this project immediately by identifying every piece of land that shouldn't be developed upon, and then developing it, developing the rest. Obviously, designing for livable communities for aging populations, as I mentioned before, is very much an intentional part of this plan as well. So a brief recap, I'm sorry, this is a little bit hard to see, but I think staff spoke to it. While we began to engage with the county in 2024, this project began much, much earlier for our clients who took the sand mines that were here and began to really create a beautiful site that is ready for development. I mean, there are beautiful lakes now, there are ecological corridors that are being created, there are little islands within the water that are really, really stunning. Then since DPC got engaged in 2019, we began to design the plan and in the past year and a half to two years, we've been involved back and forth with the county on the code we wrote and I'll go into a little bit of that as well as the master plan and refining it. We had a meeting with the community and we did hear, I spoke to a lot of members of the Cane Bay communities actually who said, we do want commercial places. We have nowhere to go. within our own communities, we would love an opportunity to sit on the waterfront and dine. We would love smaller homes where we can also retire. So that stayed in our mind. I won't spend too much time on this because staff did speak about this, but I think it's worth emphasizing that this is very costly for the developer to do. He's providing a 30-acre site for a school. And I have to say, The community I live in, kids walk to the elementary school, some kids are bussed, but kids walk to the elementary school and they walk to the middle school. And it is a wonderful thing to see, something that maybe many people in this room grew up doing, and very few of your children probably did it. So that's the kind of work we do. And the fire and EMS station I think is important as well. Traffic and roads, I think you heard about it, it's been adopted, it's been approved by SCDOT. And one thing about affordability, I just wanna say that too often as well, affordable housing comes in one mind for people. You're going to see a master plan here that has many different lot sizes and lot sizes for cottages and small multifamily and small single family homes and large single family homes too. So keep in mind that when we speak about attainable housing or housing for people of all ages, that also means different kinds of housing. Here's the background. Most of you know where it is, of course, 25 miles from Charleston. The red dots you see on the map are those urban centers, and there's an urban center missing, so we have provided for some urban or town centers, as we call them, within the community. It's 2,000 acres. It's impossible, even for us as designers, to understand the sheer size of what 2,000 acres looks like. It's huge, very, very huge, and it will be built over decades. The pink... That you see on the right is the new Cane Bay town center or village, as we call it. And what you see on the left, of course, is the existing Cane Bay. Here's what the site looked like. I wish I had had time to put in a photo of what I took today, because right now it's really, really beautiful, as you can see it right here. It's worth, and I know staff talked about this too, but the connections to the site are important. There are five connections of 17A. Osprey, it's good that our clients own both sides of the street. They're going to straighten out that intersection and make it safer. We are not connecting to Black Tom Road. and we're not connecting on the south either. Now the master plan, a little bit about the master plan and how we design. So it looks like it's hard to interpret, but the circles you see on the right are what we tend to call the concept of a neighborhood, where you can, where this, basically you can, it's a five minute walk from center to edge, and in those neighborhoods you want to have a mix of housing, you want to have a mix of open space, and you want to have walkable, bikeable streets and trails. Then you want to have a few of those that have the commercial activities as well. And I'll point to those commercial activities as I get through it. So the neighborhoods are designed, and in between the neighborhoods are these greens that are maintained. Within the neighborhoods are also greens, and of course you've got the lakes that are there. And the one thing I will say about the lakes is that we are not turning our backs to the lakes. Too often there are developments where the lakes are in people's backyards, but you're driving on the street and you have no idea that the lakes are there. In this case, and again, to an expense to the developer, but that's just the way we design, the lakes are fronted by streets or trails. So they are visible. So if you live one lot in, two lots in, three lots in, those views are pulled very deep into the site. And you will see cottage courts that open out onto the lake. It's a way to carry the value of the water, not only to make it visually accessible and open, but to really also carry that value into the site. So there was a lot of attention paid to how the land has been shaped around the lakes. So there are five big ideas, and I'm gonna speak to each of those. I won't read them here, because I'll get into each one of them. The first one is a walkable community centered around water. And we can say the words walkable, and too many times people will use those words, but what you see is not walkable. We know what it takes to build walkable community. And the first thing on a walkable community are safe streets. So a lot of time was spent designing those streets. Here you see a zoom in to the master plan. and a lot of the amenities that are really evenly distributed throughout the entire plan from north to south. You can see it here, I won't read them, but you can see that there are larger blocks, there are smaller blocks, there are smaller lots, there are larger lots, but you can also see how the streets lead to the water and how there are opportunities to create civic moments or places of community gathering also on the water. And I'll speak to one of the town centers that's up here when we get to a bigger slide of it. Here's a view of the master plan, of course. You can see there's a tremendous amount that is in preservation. The nature overlay on the south side is over 100 acres, just on that point, that place alone up against the Wynwood community. But here you can see how we're pulling the water in and being very respectful of it in the way we've laid out the master plan. Here's an example of a court. Now, these are great little green spaces. And these drawings are, when you see the master plan at this scale, the greens look teeny tiny. They look insignificant. But these are drawn to scale. So they're very generous places. They may have a pavilion in the middle. These are safe places for seniors to gather. It's also safe places for kids to play. You see the homes around. And then you see the trails along the waterfront. And here's the street. And in this case, we've extended the paving so that open space can feel like it extends right down to the water and cars sort of slow down as they come along here. But the plan is full of these, what we call these courts, or these cottage courts or these home courts that enable everybody here to have a direct view of the water. The second idea is a resilient community with unique town centers. And what do we mean by resilient community? We mean housing for all stages of life. Too often we go into a community and we hear people say, This is different to what we have here. But we know there's a crisis of affordability in the entire country. We know that for the first time ever, there are more homes with no children in them in America than homes with children. What that tells us is homes are becoming smaller and smaller. And we know that there's an epidemic of loneliness in people as they age because they're not surrounded by their peers. And so all of this tells you we have to, in our community, we take care to really design places that are going to be welcoming, not only of seniors, but of young couples who are moving in here, who can maybe afford to move in here and buy an apartment to start off with or a condo or rent before they can buy a smaller home, then move to a larger home. So it really is housing at every stage. But then it's anchored by these town centers. And there are two very different town centers. The first one is what we would call a destination town center. It's at the northern end of the lake with a series of restaurants and shops that would be along this edge here. It would be beautiful. You know, I have to say in Catlin's, again, where I live, when COVID hit, I didn't leave my community for three months. And I know that because my daughter was eight at the time. And the first time we drove out of the community, she hopped in the front seat with me and didn't put her seatbelt on because in the community, sometimes I would let it safe. The point being, there are about 30 restaurants in Kentlands. There's an Ace Hardware. There's many grocery stores. There's a cinema. There's all sorts of stuff. You can get out of your home, and a lot of people will drive out of the community, but if you can take one or two of those daily trips and walk to the restaurant or bike to the restaurant or boat to the restaurant or to the ice cream shop, as Ben was describing, that is a win, and that's a win for all the community. So there will be residential mixed in with commercial here, and then there's off 17A, there will be the more what we like to call neighborhood-centered retail. uses that are more, the laundries, the flower shops, the big grocer that's right here. In this case, another thing that really distinguishes what we like to call new urbanist communities is hiding the parking. And that's a very important part of what we do. So the parking is not front and center. in our communities. You have to hide the cars, otherwise people don't want to walk past parking lots. So there's a lot of care taken to that. And then it culminates in a square that you see here, which is surrounded by small commercial and residential buildings. And you'll see examples of what that looks like. So here's the waterfront one. You know, it'll be surrounded by four, five story buildings, maybe residential with commercial on the ground floor. The plazas are very generous. They may be programmed with all sorts of activities and restaurants can spill out onto very wide sidewalks. And we can imagine people coming up with their boats along here. We also have communities. Now, I would encourage you all, we have one community called Newtown St. Charles, which is very similar to this one. It's in Missouri. Also surrounding, it has a lot of lakes in it. And those lakes are used by the residents all year round. They kayak on it, they swim in it, they dive in it, they fish in it, they ice skate on it. And it really is part of the life of the community. And similar to Cane Bay, it is designed in a way that engages the open space with the residents that are there. And then here's the neighborhood, the one that's more centered to the neighborhood. Again, I want to point to the open space. And the open space standards, you can see how wide and generous this is. This is not a small green. It's a very wide green. These are the places where Christmas trees are lit up, where the community gathers to light their Christmas tree, for example, in a community. So that's what we do where I live. And there are standards in the development code we wrote, in the form-based code we wrote, that require that these open spaces look a certain way. A certain percentage has to be paved. A certain percentage has to have trees. It needs to be shaded. It needs to be framed by streets on all sides so that it feels accessible. It also needs to be programmable, right, so that there can be yoga on the lawn or mini soccer or whatever people want to organize. But the open spaces are designed with that in mind. So it's not left over open space. Too often that you see that in communities. That's one thing that really distinguishes our communities from other communities is that the open space is recognizable, it's understandable, and it's programmable. And the mix of building types, right? So a mix of building types is important. Often, you mix the building types either on the ends or behind you. Most people are concerned. They want to see that wherever they live, they're looking at something similar across the street. But what happens behind them, behind the alley, is less important. So you may have single family on one side and maybe townhouses on the other. Or you may have cottages on one side or townhouses or larger single family on the back. So here you see it. You're going to see a lot of alleys. Why we have alleys, I'll show you that in a sec. Here's an example of one of our communities called Rosemary Beach in Florida that has that big range of housing. And what you see is you see the density surrounding the town center, and then it feathers down as you move away from the town center. So if you're a young couple or an elderly person and you want to live in a multifamily building, and you want to be able to access the action or you want to access the coffee shop, you live in the town center. If you have kids and you want a house with a backyard, there's a place for you. If you are like me, you only have one kid and you don't want a backyard, you buy a townhouse. So you have to have that range of housing, especially when we're looking at a plan that's going to take decades to develop fully. And then the different kinds of housing, large single family, small cottages, townhouses, small multifamily, cottage courts, tower houses as we call them, live work units, which is commercial on the ground floor and residential above. Everything you see here are from our own communities. And what I will tell you is they are all designed to be what we call pedestrian friendly buildings. So they are interesting to people. They are of the architecture of the region. They have front porches. They're welcoming. There are windows that people can see. It is not cars in the front yard everywhere. everywhere. And now, factors that affect affordability in T and D neighborhoods, we spent time thinking about this. We've gone back and forth with the county in terms of trying to right-size the parking. Too often, well, I won't get into a discussion about parking, because I could go on for an hour on that topic alone. But needless to say, cities and counties around the country are reassessing the way they look at parking, because we've done it wrong too often. And we now have seas of parking that are not utilized except for Black Friday or whatever. So we have smaller lot sizes. We have carriage houses, or what we like to call accessory dwelling units. We're going to allow that in our codes. Now states around the country, Florida being one of the latest ones, are saying ADUs are going to have to be allowed in every single family neighborhood. We're not saying that South Carolina's gonna do that, but the point is it's a great way to have affordability. Your kid comes back from college, they haven't found a job yet, they live there. families want to have their parents come and live with them, they live in the ADU in the backyard. Many of us grew up seeing that being highly possible. Mixed use and walkable environment, the simplified permitting process is a big part of that. One of the reasons it's taken so long to negotiate this, and one of the reasons the developers can be contributing what they contribute is it's been an exhaustive process going through and wordsmithing every single word to make sure that it fits what the county needs, what the developer can believe in and what we're pushing for as well. Once that's done, you want to facilitate the permitting as much as possible because that does have an impact on affordability. And of course, simple building forms, not the roofs with the 17 gables. You don't need that if you have great streets. You just need simple buildings that address the street well, and it's another way to design homes that can be more affordable for more people. So the third idea is the connected network of what we like to call lovable streets. We have a range of street types that we've developed that have been carefully tailored to the context in which they're in. A street on a single family home does not look like a street where there are commercial buildings. Where there are commercial buildings, you have wider sidewalks so that users can spill out, dining for example, you have trees in grates. In single family neighborhoods, you've got green plantings and then trees that may be planted at a more regular interval. so on and so forth. So the streets are calibrated or are tailored to the uses that are along them. And of course, the vehicular and pedestrian access, very important. You see the connections of 17A. You see the connection to fairways, yes, up in here. And you can see Cane Bay Boulevard for those who want to be oriented right there. Now, what does it take for a street to be walkable? First, it needs to link interesting destinations. You have to have a reason for people to want to walk. So that's the first thing. Secondly, it has to feel safe. And we spent a lot of time working on creating safe streets. And it really comes down to the width of the travel lane, having parked cars on the side so the kids who walk on the sidewalk feel protected. Sidewalks are continuous. That's why we have alleys, so that you're not worried about cars backing out and either hitting a kid or hitting someone who's coming out. Most of Cane Bay has alleys. Not everywhere. There will be some front-loaded homes, but most of them have alleys. And the difference between a car driving at 35 miles an hour or 25 miles an hour is literally the difference between you having a 90% chance of surviving or a 90% chance of dying. So we take the design of the streets very, very seriously. They are also... They have to be interesting. You have to capture people's minds. People, to take a street and to walk along it, they cannot be walking by car parking, car parking, garage, garage, garage. They don't want to do that. They want to see homes. They want to see front yards. They want to see the activity that happens in those yards. So that's what makes walkable streets. And we spend a lot of time looking to see how we could connect the streets within this development, Cane Bay Village, as much as we possibly can. There are pedestrian streets as well. Now when we began to design these 30 years ago, the bank said there's no way nobody's going to want to live on these streets. That's not true at all. In fact, they sold for more than typical houses on streets. The houses, the garages are in the back. People access the garage from the back. This happens to be a house on a pedestrian way, often they're on a pedestrian green, and they're very safe places for people to hang out in. You know, people have block parties in them, they have block parties in the alleys too, but they also have block parties here. We have a few of these, what we call pedestrian streets. And we know what the fire needs, so we know absolutely what the fire chief needs to access those homes. There's a lot of trails, of course, a lot of nature trails that are woven in and out of Cane Bay, including trails around the lakes, of course. And the way the streets looks, the picture on the left is from Habersham. We work to save trees where possible, of course, and where there are existing trees that are as mature and as majestic as the ones we see here, we protect them. And as you can see here, sidewalks with trees and a verge. It's very uncomfortable for people to walk on a sidewalk that doesn't have a tree or doesn't have parked cars. Even if the sidewalk is wide and cars are zipping by, most people don't feel comfortable walking on those sidewalks. We know this. We know this from the social scientists we work with. So a lot of our streets have that verge or the trees and grates, and we encourage on street parking for all the reasons. It helps merchants, but it also helps create safer streets. And here are the commercial streets. They look very different, as you can see. Sorry, it looks a little dark. And the alleys. And the alleys now, we spend a lot of time discussing alleys because how do you get beautiful streets? And we want to speak about beauty too because you get beautiful streets by taking the garbage off the street and putting them in the back, by putting the transformers in the back and not in the front, and of course by putting the cars in the back. When you do that, you can really have beautiful streets. So many of the streets in Cane Bay will have that. And we tell our clients, do not design alleys to the same standards as streets. They don't need to be. They don't need to be curved. My daughter learned to skate, to scoot, to bike in our alley. And we get to know our neighbors that way too. And that will happen here as well. The fourth big idea is a rich mix of open spaces and amenities woven throughout. So here are examples of amphitheaters on the water, trails through the lake. uh... places where you can launch a kayak or a boat playground of course the playground super important and you know when you see small homes you know we'd like to tell people who move into Kentland people will trade a smaller backyard when your whole community becomes a backyard we have playgrounds we have five or six playgrounds within a ten minute walk from our home and that's how we got to know our neighbors that's how Lila our daughter made friends That's how people get to know each other. You walk your dog, that's how you're going to know them. And the Cane Bay is full of these kinds of opportunities, of these open spaces where people can come together and gather. And then, of course, the ecological lakes, islands that have been created in the lakes are really something quite unique. It's been a few years since I last saw the site, and I saw it today, and I was really, I was bowled over by how beautiful it is, and very inspired by what that can do. And the places to gather. So why is it important for places to gather? For these reasons. Because it's important for people to come together. It's important to be able to host farmers markets. And we have dining under the stars once a year. All sorts of activities. And the open spaces are designed to host those types of activities. Some more public, some more private, of course. Again, every single one of these photos are from our communities. So when I speak about these words, I'm not throwing out words that we've never done this before. We've done this in many, many places all over the world, and we're very proud of the way our communities look. And by the way, we say it's not for everyone. Those who want the very large single family home with the very large backyard, guess what? You have ample to choose from in Berkeley County. But there are many who don't. They want a smaller home. They want the walkable streets. They want the lake so they can walk around and exercise around. They want all of that. And that is too difficult to find in too many places. And that's why we do what we do. There is a rural character to it, too. Because it's so large, there will be places that feel more rural and places that feel more urban. That has to do with the way we've written the code, the form-based code, which is called a transect. It's a hard word to describe, but it basically establishes a way of living from the most rural to the most urban. And because the site is so huge, it's 2,000 acres, you can have that type of character in many different places. So there'll be places that feel more rural, naturally, because there'll be deeper setbacks for the houses, and the houses will be further apart, and the trees will be clustered, and places that feel more urban, where you have more paved areas. And here's an example of what the rural character of the Cane Bay Village can look like. The lakefront character, we'll spend a little bit of time about this because it's, I don't know how many miles we calculated at once, I actually forget, maybe Mark or Ben know, but there's a tremendous, it's miles of trails around the lake. And there are opportunities for lots of activities to happen along them. Not only the activities where people can picnic and gather, and sit and contemplate opportunities for passive uses, opportunities for recreational uses, opportunities for active uses. And what you see here are the mix of housing that's along the waterfront. And you can see the alleys. You can see the pedestrian ways that connect you. And then you can see obviously the streets and the bridges and the infrastructure it's going to take to build a place like this. And here's examples again from our own communities. This happens to be the community I was telling you about, Newtown St. Charles. The lakes are wonderful. Some places, they are more urban with a stone edge. Other times, they're like this. They're sloped. So when we talk about different characters, you will see that as well here. And sometimes you have civic buildings or community buildings on the lake as well for weddings, for community gatherings, for town halls, for the community, et cetera. And now the architecture, a little bit about the architecture. There will be a mix of housing types within each block. We like to say small is beautiful. We know how to do that and provide outdoors. Even the small units have outdoor space. And too often people think the only way I can get privacy is if I have a very large lot. I'm always amazed at the number of people that have homes on very large lots and they have zero privacy. But the way you lay the house out on the lot, and the way you can organize the open space behind it matters a lot. So that's been put into our code. So how do we regulate the vision? Very often beautiful photos are presented and then what gets built doesn't look like that at all. I have to say our communities are different because we have written what we call a form-based code. And what a form-based code is, just to simplify it, it says use is less important than the form. You want small buildings facing small buildings, medium-scale buildings facing medium, and large buildings facing large. The other thing that distinguishes a form-based code from a land use code is the fact that you think about the public realm, and when I talk about the public realm, what does the space look like between the buildings? From building face to building face, the street, the sidewalks, the trees, that matters as well, and it has to be correlated to the residential uses along it. So we've written this code, we've gone back and forth with staff, and so here's an example of how it's regulated. I showed you this rendering, and here's examples of what the code does. It regulates the height very precisely. It gives standards for sidewalks. It gives minimum frontage requirements for the open space and minimum ways in which you have to furnish it and shade it and landscape it. There are facade requirements. How deep does a porch need to be? A lot of that will be regulated by the city. Some of that will be regulated by the developer. Then, of course, how to deal with alleys. Then there are open space designs, as you can see here, what uses are allowed and what activities can happen within the different open spaces, how the streets should connect, how big blocks should be, how the open spaces should be organized. And then another one, this talks about the open space standards. This talks about the way in which the sidewalks and the trees and the grates are laid out. This talks about how wide the sidewalks are in different communities. This talks about even things as crazy as the curb radii. Too often people can take a corner and not slow down, so they just zoom around the corner. No, we force people to slow down before they can turn to make it safer for people to cross the street. And the last one I think is here. There are standards for storefronts. There are uses that are allowed. It's not every use everywhere, but the form trumps the use. And then of course, what the front yard should look like in terms of depth and what your setbacks should look like. And I think the next step does this. So there are different zoning assigned to the lots that are in here. And this tells you what you're used to seeing in the code, what your setbacks are, what your height is, what your lot coverage is, what your minimum lot size is, and all of that. And then the unique aspects of the site are also celebrated in all sorts of ways. I think you've heard me talk about it a lot. I'm not going to reinforce it other than to say, you know, here's an example of the little island that you see in the water. This is not, I mean, they actually built these islands and then took a lot of time to irrigate the sod that's there now and to actually plant trees that are there. And it really, really looks beautiful. You heard about this, I'm not going to go through it again other than to say it's comprehensive and there's a lot of analysis that's been done The developer contributions, transportation improvements, and the mitigation contemplated in the TIA. The explicit requirements for roadway interconnectivity, that's very important for all of us. The roadway repair activities resulting in the utility HOA and master developer responsibility. The roadway design standards will absolutely support walking and biking. You know, the average American takes 13 car trips a day. So, and everybody's surprised to hear that, but if, as I mentioned, two or three or four of those can be captured. You know, I walk to work. How many people can say they walk to work? I live in Kentland. I live half a mile away. When I'm driving my child to school, I can actually walk to work. There will be people here who will have jobs here who will be able to maybe walk to work, not every day, or who will be able to bike to work. Every one of our communities has anywhere between 10 to 30% of internal capture. That's cars taken out of the street because those... I walk to restaurants for lunch because I don't have to get into my car. My daughter is a free range kid. She can walk to the cinema and she can do all of that. That's something that people are going to appreciate. So the amount of time we have spent thinking about what the streets look like are important. The fact that kids will be able to walk to school, the land that's been donated for the school is very important. The commitment to the ESA, emergency service building, the commitment to provide affordable units, and the contextual cohesion with adjacent communities. As I mentioned before, there's over 100 acres. And the fact that what Ben said, and I know maybe people don't want to hear this, but they could do 9,500 units. They have cut back by over 40%. That is not negligible, and that's something to think about. And the project wins. I would encourage everybody to go to our website and see what our projects look like, because I would say, you know, Kentlands was built on what was a farm once. And now we have a community of 15,000 people, as I mentioned, a million square feet. It is an upward trade when you lose a farm for a community that really functions as a community. It is a downward trade if you lose a farm for a subdivision that does nothing else. This is not a subdivision. It really is a community in every sense of the word. There's a net reduction overall allowable density. It's too bad that people tend to associate lower density good, higher density bad, because I can tell you you can do low density well or not, and you can do high density well or not. But it is what it is. They've agreed to 5,500 units. It's an exciting opportunity for Berkeley County. I know my colleague was with Allison presenting at the South Carolina APA this project and the collaboration that happened, and it was very well received. The form-based code text establishes a level of predictability of what the community will look like. There's definite obligations on behalf of the developer, and the county knows what they have to look at. And of course it's collaborative, and of course there's trade-offs, but it does create this vision. Am I speaking about infrastructure improvements? That's it? Okay. And I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you.

Thank you. Do we have any questions for the applicant?

Madam Chair, I have several.

Okay, I'm gonna turn it over to Mr. Blackwell and then to Ms. Hoover.

And they were in order of my desires, not necessarily everyone's. First of all, I appreciate your enthusiasm. I hope you are here for whatever comes out of this, because again, I like your vision, I like your passion, your enthusiasm. You said something that struck me, because it's important to me. Berkeley County has huge trees, and especially out here, and you were talking about preserving them. A lot of the subdivisions I see developed, the first thing they do is go in there and just demolish it, flatten it, bring in field dirt, build up sites, and then build houses, which creates lots of problems. So how can you assure us that these grand trees, which is what I think most people in the low country call them, how do they get preserved?

Well, I will tell you, you know, some trees will come down. There's no way around that. But some trees will remain. And we were able to, when we designed the master plan, already identify clumps of trees that were quite unique. And if you look at the master plan, and as you can see, I mean, it's hard to see here, but there are areas where the trees have been retained already. Now, another thing that some of our developers have done is that they've, on a site this big, I don't know if Ben wants to do this, but we've had developers who have planted trees in a nursery in anticipation of planting them in future phases because you can get bigger trees earlier on. So there's lots of ways in which to ensure the trees uh... thrive having said that you know when i first moved accountants the trees were teeny tiny and you know they were not they were they were what you typically see on a on a on in a new community now those trees extend or and create a complete arch over the street exactly quite beautiful it's going to take time It's gonna take time, but there's a commitment to plant a lot of trees here. Some trees will be saved, some trees will not. I can't tell you the percentage of trees, I can't tell you any of that, it'd be disingenuous. But I can tell you that care has been taken to try, and a lot of the trees around the lakes are gonna be preserved, right? But a lot of trees will come down too. And there are trees in Klumper, there's a lot of land that has no trees on it already, because it was a sand mine. So there's a lot of it that's actually quite bare.

Right. There are live oak trees here, and I have one in my yard that is over 500 years old. You won't see that in multiple lifetimes. So those are the trees I'm talking about, the ones that have been here longer than any of us have been here, and those are the ones that are the ones I would like to see preserved. Okay, I could talk to you about that forever. Next, the common areas. You focused on them a lot of times. I don't think I heard a form for a common area. Is there a form? Are there size requirements? Did I miss something?

No, and that's a good question. So we identify open space by type. So we have standards for a plaza. We have standards for a green. We have standards for a square. We have standards for community gardens. All open spaces, it's not just you want 10% open space. What does that mean? If the 10% isn't usable, who cares? So there are standards in the minimum and maximum acreage for a square, a plaza. You know, a plaza is mostly paved, right? A green is mostly green. So those standards are established in the code to be regulated by the county.

Okay. Okay. the lakes and they are beautiful, done a great job. You're talking about access to them. So talk to us about what type of access you have and what boats can be on those lakes

Well, I'll let Ben speak more to that if he wants to. I know some parts of the lake, the dining part, of course, is going to be open and available. People will be boating in or hovering in, as I heard about today. to be able to access the dining and all of that. There will be trails around the lake. What percentage of it will be reserved for the residents versus the community at large, I have no idea. That hasn't been determined yet. That will be at a later stage. Whether it's for the residents alone or for the greater community, it'll probably be a mixture of both. But the point is that it is accessible to those who live there and it is visible and highly visible for those who are there.

Okay. Can you please come up to the podium?

Sorry. We just can't hear you. Not everybody can hear well.

You asked what type of boat. So right now it's scheduled to be just either powered by yourself or electric motors and we'll constantly monitor the speed that they can go.

But only the people who live in the houses on that lake will have access to the lake.

I'm sorry. We will have public comment in a moment. Right now, we're with the applicant. Anyone else have any of the... Go ahead. I'm sorry. I figured you weren't, so...

Okay, we do live in the low country. You live in DC, not the low country. In a matter of two years, or maybe it was three years, we had two 1,000 year floods. and it may not be you, it's probably gonna be someone else who can talk to what the impact would be if we had another 1,000-year flood. I know you're required to design for a 100-year flood. We've already experienced two, so what do we do if we experience another one? And there were impacts during both of those events.

Do you want to speak to it, James?

Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit. Sorry, James Thomas, Tom Sutton. We've been designing the stormwater control in Cane Bay since 2006. The floods you're speaking about, I believe we had, Hurricane Matthew was either 2015 or 2016, and then we had, one of those years was the thousand, one of those was Hurricane Matthew, and then we had the thousand year flood in 2024, I think September, August. At no point in any of those events was a home flooded in Cane Bay. Yes, there was water standing in some of the streets and it'd been nice if we had some no-wake signs up so people weren't driving their trucks through them too quick to push that water into the driveways. at no point has a home inside of Cane Bay flooded during one of those rain events. And that is with a thousand year flood, right? And so we're typically, state standards are pre and post designed to the two and 10 year events. The stormwater ponds are designed to the 100 year. What we've done at Cane Bay is designed our pre and post stormwater events to the 100 year because Cane Bay is essentially a plateau. It's the top of the watershed. So it either drains out to 176 or Black Dawn. And if you remember in the 2024 event, I-26 was flooded, right? And that's because they only have to meet two and 10 year in the other surrounding areas. What Grambling has done is they've retained up to the 100 year event from a pre-development standpoint to make sure that the downstream communities aren't flooded, right? So with the backside of Cane Bay here, It's not connected to, so Del Webb is on its own top of the drainage basin that flows out towards Cane Bay High School and out that way. Wildcat Track is on its own side that goes out towards 176, and then the top of Cane Bay goes out across Black Tom Road. This adds additional outfalls towards 17A, which helps the retention from that. So some of those tournament events with only having the out, outfall out black tom it sometimes used to take three five days for that water to recede down this will allow additional outfalls but at the same time we're not increasing the storm events to those ways either so I don't know if that answers or helps answer your question, but it's been well thought out. The lakes, there's over 250 acres of lakes that were not there previously. We had farmlands there, a Butler Ware pit that's been excavated into a lake that'll be additional stormwater control. Tommy Daniels track, those pits there have been expanded and there'll be additional lakes there to assist stormwater controls towards the Wynwood community.

Okay. and my other question was about traffic, and you answered the one about traffic, that this community would reduce 10 to 30% what the normal traffic would be leaving.

I think it's important with the traffic and I think some of the concerns were too from the Wynwood community. There are a number of dead end streets that kind of about the south end of this property. None of those are being extended into the community. There will be no traffic down towards the Wynwood community. The traffic is always going out towards 17A or back through Camp A.

I believe Ms. Hoover had some additional questions.

I do have a few questions. In the presentation in December, one of our concerns was affordable housing, and I noticed that in the packet that was addressed. Could you explain that to us a little bit? I know that you said in the packet, the information said that they'll be scattered throughout, which is, I believe, a very good idea. But you also said that large houses would face large houses, medium houses, medium. And so how do you work the affordable housing into that?

We do that a lot. That's also another good question. We do this a lot in our communities by, I had a slide that showed how you can mix, naturally mix housing within a block. So for example, you may have single family homes on a block, and then all of a sudden that block, and we've done this again in Newtown St. Charles for example, um, is interrupted by a cottage court that goes through the middle. So it's a, let's say a 220 foot wide deep block. I know this gets technical. You have single family homes, but all of a sudden you have a path and you have homes that turn their sides to it and they face a little green. That's just one of many, many different ways in which you can embed very naturally homes of different sizes within a block. Also, the ends of the blocks can be treated differently than the long sides of the, the short ends of the block can be treated differently than the long sides of the block, right? So there's many ways in which we naturally try to mix the density. So you don't only have houses of one price here and houses of one price there and houses of one price there, but it's mixed up a lot more. And then there is the ADUs, of course, or the accessory dwelling units. in people's backyards, which are a wonderful way to provide for affordability for, as I mentioned before, your college kid coming home or your, when I first, I lived in Miami for many years and I bought a house that had an ADU and the only reason I could afford to buy that house was because I had an ADU that I could rent. And so a lot of people will be able to buy a home and then rent the ADU, and it affords the ability to get into a home that would be maybe somewhat different. And then there's the multifamily housing, of course, right? But then there's also all the little cottages. And every neighborhood will have a mix of those houses, of the house types.

Okay, and you talked about Florida now allows ADUs in every neighborhood. That's very recent. The state decided that. So in this development, how many will be allowed? What percentage or what's the idea on that?

I don't know. I mean, not every lot can put an ADU, of course. It's really the single-family homes that can put an accessory dwelling unit. So it's only those homes, and many people will choose not to have one. Where I live in Kentlands, we have an allowance for ADUs. I can't remember what it is, but we're nowhere near it. People are starting to build them now, but for many years they didn't. They just had their garage. Now people are building over their garage.

And the last thing I wanted to say was that I was really hoping for more than 50, which was not even 1%. I would love to see that number go up a little. Thank you.

Yes, Ms. Moore.

I'd just like to actually piggyback on your comment a little bit because on the attainable housing of the 50 affordable units that were stated in the packet, these are the only ones that are described as micro units. Can you tell me a little bit about what's the idea of the micro unit? Tell me more about that if you don't mind.

What are you thinking about for the micro units, Ben?

I don't want to speak out of line.

Basically, what we're talking about is we worked closely with Ashley Powell on this. She was big on this as well. And Allison. So we're just talking about that it might be a somewhat smaller house, but you're not going to be, it's not going to, if we have an affordable house, you're not going to be driving by that house and go, oh, that person lives in an affordable house to where, you know, they feel differently or treated differently than somebody else in the neighborhood. It's a micro design, it might be smaller, but it's gonna still have the same design characteristics of the rest of the houses in the neighborhood.

That's an important point. I just want to piggyback on that. Too often, affordable housing uses inferior materials, so it looks worse. in the many communities we design, it's indistinguishable from the regular housing because it's the same window manufacturer, it's the same roof installer, it's the same siding that goes up. So it just looks like a smaller home. It's not using worse quote unquote materials. And that's a big part of it.

All right, any other questions for the applicant? All right, hearing none, I know that we have a multitude of people who would like to speak against this. Is there anyone that would like to speak for? I didn't, I mean, I'm being serious. Are you for, okay, that's fine, then come on up to the podium.

My name is Tim Schrader. I live in Four Seasons over in Cane Bay, and I really don't have any objections. I think it's a fine plan that's been produced. Concerns would be the longevity of following through with the things that have been spoken. So I have a couple of things I'd like to bring to your attention so that maybe we can incorporate that in some sort of guarantees that we follow through with. First of all, require the applicant to restrict all access to the site for site preparation and construction for traffic out for the proposed PDMUV off of Highway 17A. No construction traffic for this development be allowed through any existing abutting residential community now or in the future. Number two, require the applicant to provide second access point for Four Seasons Lakes of Cane Bay constructed solely for the emergency use and controlled by a crash gate or other remote device for use by public safety agencies. Number three, require the applicant to fully fund independent engineering inspections of plans and specifications approved by Berkeley County Throughout the construction process, these inspections shall include but not be limited to the geotechnical work, drainage system, stormwater management, erosion control, utilities, roadways, sidewalks, and all other related improvements. All inspections and acceptance procedures shall adhere to the state county standards and be conducted with the same level of scrutiny as infrastructure intended for maintenance by the county or state. Simple. Require the applicant to maintain the design, volume, and function of the lakes of Cane Bay, retention basin, system and bank stability. A reserve fund should be established by the applicant for sufficient to provide periodic surveying, assessment, dredging, and sediment removal at least every five years or sooner if function proves inadequate with oversight and enforcement by Berkeley County. Require the currently designed nature overlay, beautiful by the way, adjacent to Four Seasons at Lakes of Cane Bay to remain in its natural state and be protected by a conservation easement granted to Berkeley County, preserving it in its permanently as a nature preserve. Nice addition. Require the applicant to restore access to members of the Lakes of Cane Bay. To the HOA. to the 300-acre lake that has been closed for more than three years. I love seeing those kayaks. We'd like to get back in the water, sir. Do that for us. We'd really appreciate it. I'd actually go a long way, I think, with this crowd, as you just heard. Okay, and number seven, require the applicant to provide the second two-barrel lane along Cane Bay so that we have what was originally proposed in 2006. Let's build that other two lanes the full length of Cane Bay. That'll take some pressure off of traffic, which, as all of you know, is absolutely horrendous here in our community. These conditions are important to protect the public safety, reduce construction impacts, preserve infrastructure integrity, and maintain the quality of life for those of us who live here now. I respectfully request the board incorporate these protections prior to any approval of this application. Berkeley County's development review process is specifically intended to evaluate impacts on infrastructure, public safety, stormwater in the surrounding communities. And thank you for your consideration.

Good luck.

A lot of people to get through, so if we can hold our applause to the end, if you don't mind, because we will be here forever tonight. I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you because we were having a conversation, so if you'll just wait until we're finished speaking, then you can speak. But sir, would you please give a copy of what you just read to Allison Simmons for me, please? Thank you. We are going to try to do this in a uniformed manner. So I think we have several different subdivisions that are represented here tonight and I think that you have spoken to Ms. Simmons prior to and have designated people to speak for your subdivision. Is that correct? Do we have a consensus of people that are ready to speak for their subdivision? Yes, ma'am. Okay, well, we're gonna get to questions in a moment. I promise you, we will get there. I promise you, we will get there. We just need to get through our speaking process before we start taking questions. Do we have anyone here from, we'll just start with Cane Bay. I know that, but you've got the separate sections of Cane Bay. Which separate sections of Cane Bay are represented here tonight? Four seasons. Four seasons. All right, so we'll take four seasons. Do we have two representatives here to speak for four seasons? All right, if you would like to speak, please step up to the podium. State your name and your address for the record. You'll have three minutes.

We've got six minutes up there. Hello, my name is John Battaglia. I live at 240 Tupelo Lake Drive in Somerville. This is more of a request for all you that we do some restrictions similar to what you may have heard earlier. So what we'd like to ask for is the designation of the private roads become public or county maintained. And if that's impossible, that an independent inspection firm be hired to conduct inspections during construction just as they would be if the county were to maintain the roads. Now you're gonna wonder why am I asking this? Because where we live, we found out a dirty little secret that private roads don't go through any of the construction inspections or very little that the county roads do. And so now we're living with those conditions where we have sinkholes developing. Four people have fallen already and gotten injured on sidewalks that aren't level. Manholes that have holes in them for people getting trapped. every time we pull a manhole cover to look at things that our residents are requesting that are problems, we found two by sixes and two by fours, not scrap, four foot and six foot long ones inside the sewers for the stormwater. So the point is the construction that's being done now is not being overseen properly and they shouldn't be getting away with that. We need better oversight. So somebody should be held responsible. The county does what they do. That's fine. But where it falls into private roads, it all falls apart. Thank you.

Thank you. And I believe that you had a comment as well, ma'am, from Four Seasons?

My name is Donna Beauchesne. I live at 216 Marina Shores Court in Four Seasons. I just want to bring issues up to this council and the county that we've been experiencing for the five years that I've lived in Four Seasons. And we are now, they've developed 9 and 10. I hope you're familiar with sections 9 and 10 in Four Seasons. They're at the very end of Marina Shores going towards the lake. So when they started developing that area, they flooded the backyards on Seaside Trail because they had water issues and they pumped the water from that development site over into the backyards of the residents on Seaside Trail. The silt in the lake, the lake is not being taken care of currently. Right now we can pretty much almost walk from Four Seasons to the coves across the canal area. We have dead fish in the lake and there's invasive plants growing around the edges of the lake. To the gentleman that spoke to the clear cutting, we've experienced that on the nine and 10. They totally clear cut the area. They cut down trees that were in a protected area. They cut down an eagle's nest that was actively nesting at the time. They broke the line. We have irrigation in our common area in our community and they supposedly broke the line when they did nine and 10. We have not had common area irrigation for, this will be the fourth year. So it hasn't been fixed. So back to this, we have low water pressure. We don't have enough water pressure from the county. They didn't leave any trees standing. It was clear cut. And so we would just really, really like to see some oversight. It's not being done. It appears they have free reign. And those of us that live in this community now, we suffer. They brought in tons and tons of trucks filled with dirt because they were having the water issue at the end in 9 and 10 when they were doing that. They didn't put the trees in correctly along the streets, and that's been an issue in our community. There needs to be oversight. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, I believe we have the next community is the South Live Oak Drive area. Do we have, would you?

Could it possibly be item I?

Item B?

No.

Okay. Well then we will move on from item B. Then the next community is Blue, Radiant Blueway, Calm Waterway. Anyone wanna speak from those, that community? All right. Okay. So we've got four seasons. Is Del Webb here? Anybody else from another community? The Cove? Do we have a representative from the Cove? I just know we have a number of communities here. Yes, ma'am, are you here to speak for the co? Okay, if you'll just come to the podium and state your name and your address for the record. I'm just trying to make sure we get all the communities here represented.

My name is Lisa Bateman, I live at 294 Calmwater Way, and I am part of the Lakes of Cane Bay Residents for Accountability Committee. Good evening members of the Planning Commission. I speak tonight as a homeowner and as a concerned resident of Berkeley County, specifically representing the Lakes of Cane Bay Residents for Accountability Committee as I said. The Lakes of Cane Bay includes eight neighborhoods. We paid a premium for our homes and continue to pay into an additional HOA in exchange for access to the owner's park. a 300-acre lake and its trails for boating, fishing, and recreation, which is now rolled over into where the lake villages is planned. Please know and hear that the Lakes of Cane Bay Board, which controls these amenities, has zero homeowner representation. Out of the 300 homes in those eight neighborhoods, we do not have a single homeowner's voice or vote. The declarant retains total control until 2065. Homeowners bear a portion of the financial responsibilities and liabilities with no voice and no vote. Approximately three years ago and nearing the final phases of the community's build out, the owner's park was announced closed, initially presented as temporary due to construction. Communication to homeowners was inconsistent and unclear. After about a year, many residents returned to the trails in Lake believing the closure had lifted. Instead, we're shocked to learn that the Department of Natural Resources had been dispatched by the declarant and began handing out $465 trespassing tickets and the possibility of a criminal record to homeowners trying to access the amenities that had been promised to them and paid for. Even worse, Residents, while accessing promised amenities, including myself, found themselves verbally assaulted and threatened by a large, aggressive man on an orange ATV with an unrestrained German shepherd in tow who described himself as an employee of the HOA. The encounter I had with him was truly terrifying. Retired veterans fishing from golf carts and others enjoying the lake have been verbally abused, bullied, and in one case, had boulders thrown at them. These are not isolated incidents. As a result of these actions, many homeowners have expressed their total fear of retribution from the developer should they speak out. They are afraid that their home or local businesses may be impacted. As a developer resorts to such tactics, what else are they capable of? They wonder.

All right, our time has expired. Thank you. If you would like to just speak and if you'll just raise your hand and we'll just go row by row until we get through this and we'll have three minutes each person. Ma'am, in the blue floral shirt, if you wanna come up, state your name and address for the record. That's okay, take your time. Oh, you got a boot on.

Well, not most of the time. My name is Jan Chika. I'm at 354 Old Grade Road in Wynwood in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. I don't have any HOA. I want you all to think about the impact of all of us. Your proposal is beautiful. You talked a lot about where you came from, not here. I have four beautiful acres in Wynwood. I moved there. I bought my property from a lady who was going to live with her son. I'm not lonely. I'm happy where I'm at. I don't want to live in a dense area. I live where I live because I had elbow space. And when I drive down my road, I can stop and talk to my neighbors and nobody cares. And I have a sanctuary for little dogs and they're fenced in so they don't roam and things. But when I tried to find a new physician here six years ago, it took eight months to get an appointment, eight months to get an appointment with a general practitioner. You wanna add 15,000 people to that. How long will it take them to get an appointment to see a doctor? The answer is go to urgent care. Do you know what 15,000 people will do to our healthcare system? I just retired being a home health occupational therapist. It's what I spent 35 years doing. We can't handle 15,000 people added to our medical needs. The traffic. Everything else that's going to happen. There's a white squirrel that lives in my backyard. Do you know how rare white squirrels are? Do you know what's going to happen to the environmental impact of that? There are deer that walk past my dog's fence every night and go to my very multiple hundred year old live oak in the middle of the backyard and they eat dinner underneath that. Where are those deer going to go when they cut down all the trees that back up to the property on Wynwood? because they're gonna cut them all down, no matter what they say, they're gonna go. And where are those deer gonna live? The environmental impact, the eagles, the deer, the squirrels, what's gonna happen to them? All of us in Wynwood, we're on septic. We have access to city water, some of us are hooked up, some of us still have wells, but we're all on septic. There's a lot of people moving in, that's a lot of septic. There seems like there's an awful lot of impact going on. When I moved here, I could drive down 17 and get down to Somerville to shop and it didn't take too long. I went down to Somerville the other day and it took almost 45 minutes. You want to add 15,000 people to that. I just wish you would think about it before we move forward. Thank you. All right. Thank you.

I'm so sorry. I did not hear you, but I think this gentleman right back here had his hand up against the wall. I'm going to do this side of the room first and then I'll move over. I'll get to you. Yes, ma'am.

My name is Leroy Godfrey, Jr. I reside at 519 Gross Avenue in the Wynwood subdivision. When you asked the question, who spoke in favor or wanted to speak in favor of this, I almost raised my hand because it sounds wonderful. But the problem is I live in Wynwood, which is homes that have two, three acres, an acre. I stay on the corner lot that's had three accidents already this year in a quiet neighborhood. So when I look at trying to bring that traffic, and they mentioned five, INTERCHANGES COMING THROUGH THE 17A, THE WATER COMING THROUGH THE 17A. WHEN I MOVED OUT HERE, IT WAS COUNTRY, AND I ENJOYED THE QUIETNESS. I'M A HOMEOWNER, A PASTOR, A VETERAN. I'M HERE TONIGHT BECAUSE THIS PROPOSED MIXED DEVELOPMENT USE VILLAGE IN CAIN BAY, 5,500 DWELLINGS, THE ASPECT THAT IT WAS NARROWED DOWN FROM 9,000 That's still 15,000 people that will be coming from Cane Bay through a quiet subdivision that my kids walk through, that they go to school on, and the traffic will literally make it no longer being country. The council created this large-scale development moratorium for a reason. roads, traffic, schools, emergency services, stormwater, and the impact of the existing communities will be drastically affected, especially when would none of those problems have been solved or will be solved that I've heard yet. Yet here we are asked to lift the moratorium for one of the largest projects this county has ever seen. We're not anti-growth. We are anti-chaos. We're against growth that arise faster than the roads, faster than the schools, the drainage, the public safety that is needed to support it. Because once the trees are gone, they don't grow back. Once the traffic comes, it has to go somewhere. She mentioned taking... so much more time to get into the city. It used to take me 10 minutes when I moved out here to get to Somerville. Now it's a 30 minute drive and that is something that this county needs to consider. It cannot be undone once it's approved. Once it's built, the traffic won't disappear, the flooding won't reverse, and it is not the developers who have to live with the consequences. The deers that live in my backyard will have to move someplace else. Families that stay on the corner and let their kids walk. We've got three kids, I mean, three men in Wynwood that can drive around in motorized wheelchairs. Growth should serve the people. The people should not be sacrificed as a result of growth. Thank you.

Thank you. Yes, ma'am. You can come on up to the podium. Please state your name and your address for the record.

I am not a speaker in front of people. My name is Mamie Gainley. I live at 108 Mini Court, which is technically Wynwood. It's on the corner of Cypress Gardens and 17A. Now all these 5,500 houses, 17A is already crazy. You cannot get, I moved, I lived at the same place for 32 years in which I'm sure a lot of these people in Wynwood have lived there for a long time. And it used to be two lanes and you could get out, you could go out and you could go to town and come back and, you know, go down to the bank in Sangre, 10 minutes. Now it's 40 minutes. It's the traffic is unreal. We're building and building and building and nobody's doing anything about the infrastructure. Where's the water going? How is the traffic moving from one place to the other? I see, I door dash for 11. So I see craziness that goes on in Cane Bay. That's where I usually door dash is Cane Bay. And I see just, it's just not putting 15,000 or however many more houses you want to put on Black Tom. And just between Black Tom and 17A Wynwood, McLaurin, 176, I drive that constantly. I see all these rezoning signs. And this area just can't handle that many houses, that many people, that many. It's not going to be no nice little happy little place like they're trying to make it be. It's not going to be like that. It's going to be a disaster. And that's all I got to say. Thank you.

I'm going to go to the third. Hold on one moment, ma'am. Yes, ma'am, you're on the second row. Do you want to speak? Okay, well, then please come up to the podium. Four Seasons. Four Seasons. All right, so if you'll come up to the podium and state your name and address for the record. You'll have three minutes.

It won't take that long.

All right, thank you.

Hi, I'm Catherine Taggart, and I live at 405 Four Seasons. And I just want to reiterate, there seems to be a little bit of a disconnect between... the current Cane Bay area and the proposed area. I know in their TIA they have mentioned 17 and all the improvements along 17. They mentioned nothing about Nexton Parkway or Cane Bay and those are a disaster right now. You've got middle school, new middle school coming up there and it is crazy, the traffic is crazy there. So I just wanted to say too that $10 million to these guys, that's a drop in the bucket. That needs to be increased. And the problem is that the infrastructure was not put in prior to the development. Don't make that mistake again. Make them do the infrastructure before the development is done, because it just doesn't get done. We don't have turn lanes on Cane Bay. And the other thing I would like to just bring up briefly is the pedestrian, the bicycle, the bike paths. That needs to be included in the TIA. Those things are critical. If you want to reduce traffic, Those things, we depend on our golf carts to get to places. And there are bicycles and school kids. That needs to be part of the TIA. And I didn't see that addressed in this. So that's pretty much all I have. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, row three. I think this lady in the green and white, she had some comments or questions. If she wants to come to the podium and state her name and address for the record.

My name is Beverly Smith. I live at 511 Four Seasons Boulevard. This is a rezoning hearing, am I correct? And once you rezone this land, it's rezoned. If for some reason this project doesn't develop, doesn't come to tuition, this land is now rezoned for anyone else to come in and provide any plan they choose to do under whatever is allowed in this zoning, am I correct?

I will let staff address that. It can be...

I'm sorry, I don't know who's staff is over here.

Excuse me, if the request is denied, the... any development that will occur will be subject to the current zoning allowances within their respective districts, zoning districts, which also include anything that's currently zoned PDMU within Cane Bay.

Does that answer your question? No, no, I understood that if it was denied, but what I'm saying is if it's approved, if you rezone all of these parcels of land, NOW THEY COME UNDER THE NEW ZONING REGULATIONS. AND IF FOR SOME REASON, LIKE, IT'S ALL BEING BASED ON A PROJECT THAT WE GOT A WONDERFUL PRESENTATION ON THAT LOOKS GREAT, BUT IF FOR SOME REASON THAT PARTICULAR PROJECT DIDN'T GET FOLLOWED THROUGH FOR ONE REASON OR ANOTHER, YOU'VE NOW REZONED 2,000 ACRES OF LAND AND OPENED IT UP TO ANY OTHER DEVELOPER COMING IN AND GIVING ANY KIND OF PROPOSAL THEY WANT UNDER THE REGULATIONS. IS THERE ANY WAY THAT YOU CAN TIE YOUR APPROVAL FOR THE REZONING TO THIS PARTICULAR PROJECT THAT'S BEING PRESENTED AS WHAT WILL ACTUALLY HAPPEN ON THIS LAND? MY CONCERN IS SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT COULD COME IN AND BE ALLOWED UNDER THIS ZONING. I don't know if I'm being clear on what I'm asking.

Yes. Yes, you are being clear. So if the rezoning was to move forward, the applicant would be held to the regulations within the PD text. The applicant would only be able to do what is a permitted use within

UNDER THE NEW REZONING. YES. BUT WE ARE BASING OUR DECISION TONIGHT OR AT LEAST OUR DISCUSSION TONIGHT ON WHAT HAS BEEN PRESENTED AS WILL HAPPEN ON THIS LAND. SO MY CONCERN IS, IS THERE ANY WAY YOU CAN TIE YOUR VOTE IF YOU APPROVE IT TO THIS PARTICULAR PROJECT VERSUS OPENING IT UP TO SOMEBODY ELSE IF THIS DOESN'T GO FORWARD? THAT'S MY QUESTION.

I would probably gander yes. Our job is to make a suggestion or a presentation to county council for suggestion. County council will make the final decision after their third reading. But everything goes through planning commission to county council. So yes, ma'am.

Okay, so you can tie it into that.

It's all going to be tied towards the presentation.

You're making a decision on what's being presented to you versus just rezoning 2,000 acres of land. Yes, ma'am. Okay, thank you. That was my question.

Yes, ma'am.

All right, row four. We have just a lot of people to get through, so I'm just going to go row by row.

Okay, my name is Tamara Thompson, 413 Seaside Trail, in Somerville and in Four Seasons. And one of the things I had was the man at the end mentioned about the water rising, and this had nothing to do with when they added extra water, but my house and the two houses on either side of my house, I brought it just to show for the last two years, we have all bought the, what do you call it, the, I can't, now I got, Flood insurance, sorry. The flood insurance from the government. So three houses, and there's a bunch of houses, of course, on the street. I have no idea if other people have it, but they probably do. And this is for nothing other than just to protect our houses from when we have a big storm. And then I brought a picture of it. This is on a tree behind my house, just one house over, and it's a conservation area. clearly in big letters do not disturb and this is run I don't actually know what they do but this is the US Army Corps of Engineers does that not stand for anything I mean it's it should shouldn't it I mean there is there are animals back there and there isn't much left and then the last thing was they did a lot of talking about lifestyle and all of that stuff they did not talk about the things that other people mentioned the traffic the all the other issues how do people get in there and there it sounds like they're building hundreds and thousands of houses that is a lot with and the last meeting that we had here um a long time ago i don't remember what month it was last year maybe and there were a lot of people that stood up and said our family has lived here for 300 years and which was kind of shocking for people from other areas of the u.s because We don't think like that, but it's great. But the point is that most of the people that night were complaining about traffic way before all of this got all placed and was given, they could do it and now they're ready, but they didn't talk about any of that kind of stuff, sorry. It was just about how beautiful it is and on and on. So that was all I was gonna say.

Yes, ma'am, thank you. All right, next person on that same row. Go ahead, yes, ma'am, come on up forward.

Sorry, I had to row hop. I wake up at 3.30 a.m. and I've been up since 3.30 a.m.

Okay, well, I couldn't tell that you row hop, so that's between you guys.

I was in her seat, but all right.

Good evening. My name is Denise Harwell Masterson. My family has owned the property at 2127 South Live Oak Drive for over six generations, dating back to Samuel Pinkley Driggers in 1875. I am here as a concerned neighboring property owner adjacent to 1800003038, AKA one of the red diamond access points. I would first like to quote a statement made earlier by one of you. I think the people that are adjacent deserve every consideration. I could not agree more because those of us living directly beside this proposed development will bear the greatest impact. I wanted to express my disappointment regarding the lack of communication surrounding this project and tonight's meeting. During Town Council meeting on 11-12-2024, there was an agreement and an understanding that developers would meet directly with concerned property owners to discuss and negotiate project details. Despite that commitment and a slew of emails between Charlotte Neal, the principal of True Scout Properties on behalf of Mr. Gramley, asking to be notified and she was told me, rest assured she would notify me by email correspondence about any future meetings. This did not occur. It does not reflect transparency or good faith communication with residents that are most affected by this project. The proposed development of 038 would place an entrance near my late father Delharwell's property, significantly increasing traffic along 17A and making it far more difficult and dangerous for my elderly mother to safely access her driveway, which is close proximity to her bedroom. It separates the property line between us and my uncle. Remind you, this is six generations. I strongly oppose using this location as an access point or a roadway. An alternate suggestion was to preserve this space as green space, a wildlife conservation area, or given the areas of historic severe flooding for further deforestation. Like the gentleman said before, once land is lost, it cannot be restored. I would like the commission to consider the atmosphere in this room. Planning Commission members, I ask that you allow this matter to proceed to town council. As a nurse, I echo the concerns that while expansion has occurred, we cannot keep up in the healthcare system. Cane Bay was once swamplands, bamboo, cane, and wetlands. You cannot tell us the percentage of trees that are going to come down, and that 10 to 30% of traffic reduced is at my mom's bedroom window. Thank you.

All right, thank you. The next row back, I can't, I'm gonna have to stand up. I think we're on the fourth, ma'am in the red. Do you please come up and state your name and address for the record? And then we'll have another one up on deck. Do we have, who's, okay, yes sir in the blue, you'll come up next.

My name is Betty Futch, I live at 243 Summer Lane. These new subdivisions have already adversely affected our neighborhood. The water flow from 17A, they won't even clean our ditches where the water will run out, it just sits there. They have no consideration for anything that they do to the neighborhoods that have been here forever. And we are all fed up with it, and we're fed up with the politicians that keep allowing this.

My name's Brian Benedict, I live at 351 Bow Lane, right on Marshall Acres where they built Cane Bay High School just a few years ago, laugh out loud. It was interesting when we were living there that they built the homes right there along Marshall Acres across the way for that subdivision. And I don't know, about three or four months later, there was a notification saying that we needed to attend a meeting here in this room several years ago. because said community did not like seeing the mobile homes across the way. And they wanted to erect a fence between their property and Marshall Acres Drive. And in talking with said developers, come to find out they wanted us to help pay for the fence, which we didn't think was very... beneficial to us because we'd been there a whole lot longer since my wife's family lived in that house since 1970. So it's just interesting to see how dynamics have changed over the years. When you're looking at, and I enjoy the young lady's presentation, but there's not very many of us where I live that are gonna be enjoying those amenities that she was talking about because there's not very many of us that's gonna be purchasing property in there, okay? She would have done great at another presentation, They didn't read the room. They were here presenting to you, not the community. That's what they did. They didn't read the room. That's one of the issues that they had. One of the other things that they haven't mentioned is when you add 5,500 homes, you also have to add police protection. And that's an added cost to build schools. I know that they're saying that each house is gonna pay an $1,850 thing, but when you add that or multiply that together with 55 homes, that comes up to $10,750,000, which sounds like a whole lot of money, but it's not, okay? Who's gonna pay for all this this extra infrastructure that we're gonna need from the water to the property, not the property, but to the roads and everything. And I cheated, and I did chat GBT. Great thing. It says intersections are going to be between $50 and $200 million for this project. Water and sewer expansion, estimate between $40 million and $150 million. Stormwater, drainage, flood mitigation, between $20 and $100 million. New schools and expansion, because of all the people coming in, $80 million to $250 million for all this. and everything. So that's one of the things that they're not talking about is the money that it's gonna cost the neighboring subdivisions. And that's what I'd like you all to take into consideration.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Jennifer Smith Kopetska. I live at 226 Windwood Lane in the Windwood community. As a homeowner, taxpayer, daily driver, and employee within the Berkeley County School District, I have serious concerns about whether infrastructure, schools, traffic planning, and community resources are realistically prepared to support growth on the scale being proposed. I work within the school district and from firsthand experience, I can say that the population growth in this area is already placing significant strain on schools, staffing, transportation, and overall capacity. With approximately 5,500 dwelling units proposed, I do not believe that the designated school land for Berkeley County School District will support the likely student population increase this project could generate. I'm also concerned about the impact this scale of development may have on traffic, especially on roads that are currently relatively quiet residential routes. Many residents choose this area because it was less congested and traffic is already a serious concern throughout Charleston and Somerville areas. In addition, I am concerned about the long-term impact on homeowners through rising insurance costs and increasing property taxes tied to rapid development and expanding infrastructure demands. I understand growth is happening throughout Berkeley County, but residents here are specifically concerned about the impact on this community and whether infrastructure is realistically prepared before development at this scale moves forward. Thank you.

Good evening. My name is Christopher Gordon. I live at 237 Linden Street, Moncks Corner, South Carolina. It's in the Wynwood subdivision. When I came up here to speak, I was like, man, I'm going to be raw, and I'm going to yell, and I'm going to raise. I'm emotional. I'm actually really emotional. When I moved over there, when we moved over to Wynwood 11 years ago, it was like, let me just get away just a little bit, just a little bit. Now all of a sudden it's just on top of us. And I was just listening to these people talk, and they were talking about these traffic studies. Ray Charles must have did these traffic studies because, I mean, I drive these roads every day. And let me tell you something. It takes an hour to get from 199 to my house in Wynwood at 5 o'clock traffic. It's ridiculous. I mean, and then the people that come down Farrell Street, that's a drag strip. And they cut through to get to 176. It is ridiculous. And he talks about enhancing life. Enhancing? Whose life is he enhancing? When I sit in my front yard, some of y'all may see me sitting on my front porch. My Yorkies are running around. My life is enhanced. I'm living a good life. I get to pull my rollback in my yard. My RV's in my yard. I get to enjoy life. That is what life is about. You understand? I don't care about Washington, D.C. I've been privileged enough to travel the country. I've been on TV. I've done Discovery Channel. I've been able to do that. But on national TV, I call Monk's Corner home. And I stand behind that. That's my home. And I've grown up in the low country. I'm class 2004 Somerville. I've watched everything go away that used to be. And now, like, I'm trying not to even... Why am I getting emotional? I'm a grown man. It's sad that... Money is the root of all evil. And I like money. And I spend money a lot. But it's just whoever can buy off or pay off or do whatever and spend, things just happen. I got 162 signatures from the Wynwood community of people who couldn't show up tonight that oppose this. You could say all you want, and they talked about, oh, there was no flooding in Cane Bay. No, I do emergency storm for cell phone towers, power restoration. And the nights of those floods, guess who was out riding around checking it out? Me and my wife. Yeah, Cane Bay might not have flooded, but Black Tom, the water was over, the bricks of these double wads back there. Yeah, everything around it flooded, but oh, Cane Bay was fine. And I understand a lot of people aren't from here. But when you've grown up here and seen what has happened to our community, and we put people in charge to protect our community of, I don't know, like she said, six generations. I've lived here all my life. It's not what it used to be. And if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Tracy Burleson and I live at 163 Calmwater Way in the coast of Cane Bay. Our neighborhood has seen dramatic changes in the addition of Phase 3 and 4 for building at the back of our neighborhood. This area was previously part of the area leading up to the owner's park and had sufficient walking trails. We all enjoyed watching the eagles. A lot of us went back there walking in the natural areas. That was denied to us as a member that we pay into our separate HOA of our owner's park. So we are actually looking forward to getting access back to this area. Growth is not bad, but we want some limitations about what that growth is gonna include. We'd like the promises that are made today to be for the future as well. This is not our experience of what we have had in the coves. And I will just say in the almost 700 pages, I have a question on page 611. I'm assuming that these dotted lines are the roads that are running through this area. The little dotted line that is missing at the top of phase three running through the coast is probably a road. That road hooks up to Calm Water Way, which is in our neighborhood. Is this going to be the access point for the front half of Cane Bay to get back to this new development? I'm not sure. I would like to know where they assume that this traffic is going to enter into this new development from. At the back in Fair Winds Boulevard, that's a regular road that will continue on probably through the developments and be able to hook up into and around the lake area. But where's the front half of the neighborhood going to access this area from? This is my one question. Hopefully it's not through our neighborhood because we can't handle 5,000 cars or half that number, 2,000 cars, or the 13 trips a day that people are taking in and around this area. The other thing I would like to say as well is on page 314, it looks like we have stop signs that are directing traffic into these areas, into 17A and the surrounding areas. If we're just looking at stop signs, we all know stop signs don't work. We've tried roundabouts. Our roundabouts had to be redone because they are such a mess. So I would just encourage you to review what the roads are going to look like at those intersections because we're probably going to need stoplights. Thank you.

My name is Michael DeSanto. I live at 123 Winter Court inside Wynwood. I've lived there for over 47 years. I just have a statement to make about, like she brought up, there's stop signs that are placed or will be placed on 17A. For safety, I feel all those intersections should be looked at as stoplights. And all that done before accidents occur, after a development is done, or deaths begin to occur because there's so many people coming in and out trying to... enter onto 17A, which is a very busy road already. So definitely stoplights there I think would be the wiser thing and should be done first, not after the development is there and people are getting hurt. Then on the water drainage, since Cane Bay has opened, I've seen the water drainage change from going through Wynwood subdivision to Lakewood, Chaparral Ranch's area and all that. Gross Avenue has flooded over and washed away twice since Cane Bay has opened and it never flooded over, never came close to flooding over because it was equally distributed between both of the neighborhoods and both of the lakes that are in there. Then they changed it to where now the water flow is back over Wynwood Lane. So they've redirected the water flow again. Now they're gonna strip all the land and put asphalt and sidewalks and drain pipes instead of allowing it to drain through swamps. which delays water movement and change. So much water movement could have been billions of gallons over days to billions of gallons over hours, which is gonna cause the lake, the windward lake to possibly overflow and wash out, cause content to wash out when the Lakewood Lake overflows. So those two things there, street safety on 17A and also water drainage runoff should be addressed. Yes, they have large lakes, but all that area used to be swamps that would get eight to 10 feet deep in places. Now it's gonna all drain off very, very quickly. That's all I have to say.

Thank you.

Good evening. My name is Doug Staracci, 178 Greenwich Drive in Meridian in Cane Bay. I was listening to this presentation and talking about alleyways. Homes with the garages are behind them. I don't know if any of you have lived in Brooklyn or Queens, New York, but that's exactly what they're planning. They're planning Queens and Brooklyn. And after a while, those alleyways, they're not going to be pleasant. They're not going to be, oh, hello neighbor. Trust me, it's not. I have lived it. I've seen it. And another large concern that I have right now is that we have a problem with rentals in our communities. And that big problem is that these rental companies are not vetting. They're not vetting. And we're having problems in our neighborhoods, not just Meridian, but in all of them. And now they're also discussing about lower cost housing. What my concern is, that this smaller lower cost housing is going to be bought up by these rental companies and easy money, section eight. Now, so my point is, this is a concern and I'm sure other people share this concern, but aren't sure that they should voice their opinion. So I'm gonna try and do it for them. So I'm asking this body to think about this long and hard because we don't want this beautiful area to become Queens or Brooklyn. Thank you very much.

Hello, Charles Kramer, 337 Fish Creek Court in Somerville in Four Seasons. I don't know where to start this. I like to think of long range, like how long humanity is going to exist. But what I want to narrow it down to here is the young lady that presented this large lake that people are going to be boating on and they're going to dive in and swim. We have alligators. But aside from that, I came here in 2018 and in my backyard, the alcove, you could see down five feet and it was nice and clear, beautiful. You go there today and you see zero. The 20 feet offshore, the geese stand there, and I can see their ankles. I just got some waiting boots. I'm going to go stand there and send this in to somebody. This is a very long range thing that's happening here. The weeds are growing all over. You can see it all around. They spray them and that weeds just sink down and form sludge and are filling it in. We have 18 inch pipes, maybe two miles of it from 50 drains in our community and all the stuff off the roof, the ground, The sidewalks, the streets, everything goes in, in, in. And it's just filled in behind my house, 20 feet out from the original shore. And I just want to make everybody aware that I looked at one of our postings, Tim might have seen it, in front of our lake house. There's a little pond that's dug out. And the quote was something like $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 to dredge it. This is three miles. And nobody's, when I bring it up and ask somebody to do the dredging in my backyard, they're not responding, they won't do it. And when I did talk to one person, I won't even say who it was, they said they probably wouldn't even work with us if we brought up something like that, if I went and got a expert from the county on wastewater and the depths of the lakes and whatnot. So I just want to make everybody aware that this is extremely long-term, long-range thinking about it, and that that giant lake is gonna be a problem if they don't take care of it. All right?

Hello, my name is David Stevens. I represent 309 Old Grade Road. That's an interesting piece of property because it is directly across from the end of Wynwood Lane, okay? I have heard and several other people have heard that there were plans afoot to try to break through there from Cane Bay to hook up to Wynwood Lane. One, is that true? I'd be interested to know since it would have to go through our yard. Is there a plan to break through to Wynwood Lane somewhere? I would like to know that. I saw the map where it shows the different places where it's gonna come through to 17A. There was about five or six different places, I think it was. None of them were specifically Wynwood Lane, but I have seen where the map comes right up to it. So I don't really understand quite what's going on with that particular road. You know what I mean? If there's going to be a breakthrough there, it would be nice to know about, because that's going to kill traffic. I mean, right now, I can sit in my front porch and count the cars that go by my house, and it's probably less than a dozen in a day. It's just the people that live all the way down at the dead end and come back out. That's all of our traffic. So, you know, if it breaks through anywhere, if it's gonna come through, you know, if you guys are gonna hook up to Old Grade Road, coming back from the dirt pit, or if you're gonna come through the woods and try to hook up to Wynwood Lane, or if you're gonna hook up to Harvest from the other end of Old Grade, you know, any of those things are gonna send thousands of cars through our neighborhood, you know? And the neighborhood will never stand up to it. The roads won't stand up to it. Those roads were never built for traffic. They were built just for the few of us that live back there. Anyway, that's all I wanted to know. Thank you. Is where the traffic's going.

My name is Pamela Austin. I live at 437 Four Seasons Boulevard. I've been there nine years. Before that I lived in Del Webb at Cane Bay and I just want to point out that I was there in October of 2015 and Del Webb was flooded. So to say that Cane Bay doesn't flood is not true. I couldn't get out of our neighborhood for three days and I had an SUV because the roads were so, I mean the roads were covered, the sidewalks were covered, it was halfway up my yard. It was a disaster and some people had water in their garages. I also have concerns about the beautiful presentation they made about how beautiful the village is going to be, but I was wondering if any of you have seen the horrific ugly black fence that was put up between Phases 9 and 10 of Four Seasons and the proposed village high density area, which is the narrow part on the east side of the lake. I don't know how you would call this ugly fence beautiful, but you would, I hope some of you come out, go out there and look at it because it doesn't look like anything that they are proposing. Also, as it was pointed out by the young lady from Lakes of Cane Bay, for three years we've been paying fees to have access to that lake, and we have not been allowed to. My husband and I moved here nine years, we moved from Del Webb, The vast majority of the reason was because of the lake. I mean, we were already in Cane Bay. We were already in a 55 and older gated community. My husband's in a power chair. He's permanently disabled. And it was the only way he could fish was I could get him in a golf cart and I could take him up to the big lake. He can't do it in the canals in our neighborhood because they're very steep. But that was the whole reason we bought. And it was the first place our salesman took us. He rode us up there in a golf cart and said, look at this beautiful lake you're going to have. I did not move to Four Seasons to go get ice cream. I moved there to be able to go up to a beautiful lake where there's wildlife and there's you know, nature and there's fishing and it was peaceful. And I just, I don't think they really know what people in the surrounding communities really want. And it's not what they are proposing. And I just have one question. Is this lake gonna be public or private? Because, I mean, have you decided? Is the lake gonna be public or private, sir?

Okay. Okay, excuse me.

And how do they propose to keep it private? And do we, it could take five to 10 years for them to develop this. Do we continue to pay five to 10 years for access to a lake we have no access to?

All right, thank you. Your time is expired.

And I really would like to know how they're going to keep it private.

Thank you, yes ma'am.

And if we're ever going to get access to it in my lifetime.

Yes ma'am, yes sir.

Yes, my name is J.R. Campbell. I live at 335 Winding Road. I'm more concerned of the outer perimeter of this city to the people that live there. I've already seen all kinds of things. I have been mobile welding in Berkeley County, Dorchester County for about the past 30 years. I've seen the damage going on to the environment. so on and so forth, something I think should really be paid attention to. I don't want to beat a dead horse suggestion. If you all want to see what these fancy cities look like, I've got family in Missouri and in Florida. Take a road trip. Go see what people around there say about them.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, and I think this is our last speaker for the night.

I really more just have a question. My name is Kathy Pierce. I live at 109 Bell Tree Court, which is right off of Farrell Drive. Everybody keeps talking about the lakes and the things that, nobody's talking about the problems that we have with the mosquitoes and the control. How is any of that, how's that gonna be affected? Our community, if you look around this room and look at the paintings on the wall, you see land and beauty. What is being proposed is a community stacked on top of each other with no room to outstretch. That's one of the things that I think that this needs to be considered with this vote. I know that they have been approved for 9,000 units is my understanding, which is a far cry why that was approved. This doesn't seem to be any better with stacking people on top of each other. Just one of the things I would like for you to consider. Thank you for your time.

All right, and I think this is now our last speaker. Oh, two more? Two more, okay. Two more and then that's it. We could go here all night and we all have things to do tomorrow.

Hi, I'm sorry for holding everybody up. I just have two quick questions. Yes, ma'am. My name is Pam Trucolo. I live at 538 Four Seasons Boulevard in Four Seasons. And my questions are, what is the timeframe for this huge development that you're planning that sounds beautiful? So I'd like to know what the timeframe is and also the construction companies that are going to be building this and taking care of this. Because if it's the companies that we've had in four seasons, I can tell you that the lake is going to be non-existent by the end of the construction because nobody supervises anything. They have tons of construction debris that flows into the lake And those are my two questions. Who is the construction company? Who is that going to be? And obviously it's going to be more than one construction company. You'll have multiple subcontractors. But it's a question that I have and I'd like to have an answer. And what is the length of time? What's your timeframe for this? And I can say, if I can make another comment, please, just one more comment, that once the trees are gone, they will come back, but it'll never be the same, and it's going to take years for anything green to be sufficient.

All right, thank you.

So that's the question about the timeline.

Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am.

Okay, thank you.

You've still got time, if you could just address us.

Oh, I am so sorry. Yeah, that's okay. I'm so sorry about that. But yeah, so it's the length of time, the construction companies, who's going to be overseeing that, and well, those were the two questions.

Thank you. We'll see if staff can get you an answer for that. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. The development agreement contemplates a 25-year term, so we anticipate build-out over the next 20, 25 years.

for this one development?

Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Similar to Cane Bay. Cane Bay was initially entitled.

Nobody can hear an answer if you're grumbling.

It's similar to Cane Bay. Cane Bay was initially entitled around 2006 and it's now reaching its build out.

So about a 20 year term is envisioned for this project as well.

As far as who the builders are, I can't speak to that. I defer to the applicant.

Okay. So we won't have access to the lake? in that for that whole time frame.

I can't speak to that. That's a question for the applicant.

Thank you. All right. Thank you.

Thank you. Yes, sir.

Hi, my name is Bonnie Edelman. I live at 187 Greenwich Drive in Meridian. I just heard something that really upset me, the fact that the lake is only going to be for members. That was a huge selling point when we bought our house here. You have access to this beautiful lake. We can't get anywhere near it now. We've been paying for it, for the use of it, so I'd like to know when I can expect my refund check for the amount of money that we have paid for the use of this lake that we have no use of. And I'm just wondering, I'm like her, I wonder who the builders are. D.R. Horton should never be allowed to get in there because they're terrible. And I forgot what the other thing was that I wanted to say, but I just wanted to, it's not right that it was a huge selling point for all of us to move into this place, that lake, you have your own private key you can get into, you have access, it's beautiful, blah, blah, blah, and then we get in there and find out, eh, sorry, it's not right. And these guys, they don't live here. They don't know what it's like here to live in South Carolina. D.C. is nothing like South Carolina. I've been there. So they can't tell us that it's going to be absolutely beautiful, you're going to love the alleys, you're going to love this, you're going to love that. They don't know how we live here. And I'm a transplant. I admit, I'm a transplant. I've been here nine years. And since I came here, it was absolutely stunning when we drove here. All I could see was green. I was videotaping everything. So green, so beautiful. what happened to the sacred pine that everybody always says, we're so proud of the sacred pine here, and they want to wipe out how many acres? Just saying. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, do we have any questions for the applicant from the commissioners?

Madam Chairman, I would like to give the developer an opportunity to address some of the issues that have been raised.

Excuse me. Would the applicant like to come back up to the podium and address some of the questions that were raised? Excuse me. The applicant is speaking.

I can't address every single one of the 50 people that spoke, but some of the things that people are mentioning are concerns I'm listening to, but some of them are not caused by us. And some of them, I'm not saying aren't true, but I think they're misinterpreted. But, you know, some of the things that people are complaining about are inside their particular neighborhood that, we didn't or are not constructing, especially when it comes to the K-Hop Four Seasons neighborhood. That is being constructed by K-Hop naming. I'm not speaking to anything that they're doing. I'm just saying that your complaints about that is we're not in control of that. Now, somebody also asked if we Is this a rezoning earlier and would we be held to the standards that we're showing in what we have presented and worked through with the county over the last 18 months? This will have a development agreement with it and the PD and it will be strictly monitored by the county to ensure that we're building what we have worked with the county to create, it can't just be come in, it's not a new zoning, it's a new zoning but with the certain standards that are required, that's all I have to say.

All right, no, we're, sir, can you please come back up to the podium just real quick? I just wanna ask the question of access to the pond, the lakes.

Okay.

Do you have an answer for them for that?

Yes, when somebody asks how long the development's gonna take for one thing.

No, no, no, no, no, no, we're not doing that. He's speaking, if you wanna speak, you will wait your turn.

My guess was is when you heard the development might take 20 years to build out that you're saying, oh, does that mean we're not gonna have access to the lake for 20 years? No, that's not the case. Well, we'll be opening the lake back up soon. But just know this, there will be times, okay, when a certain amount of work is being done right beside the lake that we will at times have to take sections and go, okay, stay away from the section. And that will happen. But our goal is not to restrict the access of the lake. Its goal is to get you back out there. but there was some work being done, okay? We want you to have access back to the lake. I mean, that's what the dream was, and I do understand some of your frustration with that. That is why that we did lower those homeowners associations dues during this time. But with that being said, and now I'm finished.

All right, thank you very much, sir. All right, no ma'am, we're done.

I have a question for staff. Were there meetings with the community, between the developer and the community, during the past 18 months?

The applicant hosted meetings, Charette, if I'm not mistaken, as part of the request to lift the large-scale development moratorium. So the applicant met with the community prior to council lifting the moratorium in 24.

all right thank you any other questions do we have any information about the meeting when it was how it was attended or anything like that because it sounds like there are a whole lot of questions seems to me like there are two categories of questions it's the the people who live in cane bay have questions for the developer how it's going to affect them the neighbors also have questions about how it's going to affect them. It seems to me the smart and most productive way to handle this would be first of all for two meetings to take place, one with the Cane Bay residents and the developers and another one with the neighbors so that you can save time. I feel like that that is absolutely necessary before I would feel comfortable going anywhere forward with this.

All right. I do believe that staff's recommendations were mitigated with subject to conditions. Is that something that we can add into a subject to conditions?

You can. As I always say, if you feel like you do not have enough information to base an informed recommendation, you also have the option of deferral.

All right. Any other questions for staff? Do I have a motion?

First of all, I think it would be a good idea to ask the developer if he would be willing to defer for one month and during that month have two meetings, the two meetings that I described.

Would the applicant like to answer that question?

We didn't only have just one meeting, we had two meetings. And they were posted and they were very well attended. So this is, having other meetings is not going to change the answers. We've had the two meetings, we've showed our project, we have worked on this now with staff for 18 straight months. And truly this is a down zoning of the property right now. I don't know how we can do anything more than what we're doing.

Well, Mr. Gremlin, I believe that probably there were meetings, but obviously there are still misunderstandings. And I think that communication would be a really good way to help the people in the community in Cane Bay and neighboring communities to understand a little bit better. Whenever it was an idea 18 months ago, they might not have had the same questions that they have now. I just feel like communication would be very, very helpful to them and to you.

If you think, madam, that that would be very helpful and y'all would like to have another meeting, if we can promise it won't last this long, then I will have another meeting.

That's why I suggested two so that it would be one group that would be just talking about the surrounding area and one group that would only be dealing with issues that are internal to Cane Bay. That was the reason I suggested two so that they wouldn't be as long.

So the question posed to you is would you like to defer? If you defer, you get more time.

If I defer, I get more time. I really don't want to defer. I want to continue on is what I want to do. I mean.

I understand that.

Are you asking me would I have these two meetings that have to be at times that, you know, there's been lots of plans made. There have to be times that we can coordinate them with, but.

We have a motion on the floor for you to defer.

It's not a motion for me to defer. That's y'all's decision.

Well, we're giving you the opportunity to defer so that we don't have to take that deferral from you. If you defer yourself, it doesn't count against you.

I don't even know what that means. Okay. What do you mean by that?

Allison, would you like to explain that? Sure. So Plenty Commission has, per state law, the option to defer an item. You can vote on it so long as the deferral is not going to push the next meeting out beyond 30 days. Our next meeting is within the 30-day window, so you have within your options the option to defer. What Ms. Kearns is speaking to is this 30-day limitation. So if a deferral is being discussed and it's beyond the 30-day mark, it can only be deferred should the applicant desire to do so.

I still don't know what the difference is between them deferring and me deferring.

Do you?

I think what she's talking about is the time limitation. You can defer unlimited amount of times. They can only defer one time up to 30 days. Our next meeting is within, I think it's 27 days. So you have the option to defer if you feel like that is an appropriate course of action.

Are you saying if I defer now, okay, then they could have the right to defer again at the next one? I'm not going to defer.

Thank you. That's how we needed to know.

The idea is, though, that it would give you more time if you needed more time to set up the two meetings. It was not intended to be a punishment.

All right. Then with that, do I have a motion?

I'll tell you what. I got one more thing. Okay. I'm not deferring, but I would have two meetings before the next council meeting.

All right, thank you.

I make a motion to defer.

I second that. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right, thank you. We'll be deferring. Allison, do we need to?

Thank you.

All right, just for a matter of housekeeping, Allison, we're deferring items A through L. A through M. A through M. A through M. We're still in a meeting. Yes, we're still working. Thank you.

All right, if you're staying for the remainder of the meeting, you need to sit down. If not, please exit.

Thank you.

All right, the group in the corner, if y'all could take that outside. Thank you. Sir, ma'am, in the red and the blue, excuse me. All right, just so that we can have some clarification of and some housekeeping. That item five, item A through M was deferred. Just that we have that clearly on the record without any interruptions. Is there any other items on the agenda that staff would like to address?

None at this time.

All right, do I have a motion to adjourn? Motion to adjourn.

Second.

We have a motion by Ms. Hoover, a second by Mr. Hoover. We're done.