Planning and Zoning Commission - workshop

Thank you very much.

All right. Okay. Mr. VanWay. Mr. VanWay. Let's pray again.

Lord, thank you again for all your blessings. I pray everybody involved with this have the wisdom of God. You give us eyes to see and ears to hear. You bless all our community, our citizens, our businesses, every aspect of this community. Thank you for all those who serve here. We just pray your blessings on them. Bless our presenters today. Father, we just ask for your continued blessing on our community today. In Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Amen. Yes, sir. I'm going to turn it over to Nathan. The team's worked very hard with DPZ here today, and we're very excited to have their involvement. So I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Norris to begin today.

Thank you, Rick. I appreciate that. And I'm just going to give a brief overview of where we are and what to expect. As a reminder, we started this comprehensive planning process toward the end of last year. We're now to the point where we're ready to have our consultant team share with you exactly what they're recommending. So just over the past week, we've had three different updates to the comprehensive plan. So we're still in that process in this meeting of gaining valuable feedback. So this is not a presentation that Marina Corey is going to give you that says this is what the comp plan is. This is a presentation that she's going to give that's essentially going to be a discussion. So if you have any questions, don't sit on them. We don't need to wait to the end of a presentation because it's really not a presentation, it's a discussion. Marina is pretty hard charging. She can speak quickly. And so hopefully we're going to get her to slow down just a little so we can take everything in. But I just want to make sure that everybody understands that this is not the time to be super pensive or hold back. This is a time for us to provide input and feedback to what she's heard, as well as what she and her team are recommending. The comp plan as a whole is not a radical departure from our previous comp plan and its updates. As a reminder, 2009 was the last full rewrite And so this is not radical in any way, but it's important that we get it right because the comp plan has true legal authority in the state of Florida with how we implement things. So it is important that we get things into it that we really think need to be into it. And if you have questions or don't understand, it's an opportunity to address it. I'll fully I'll just prepare you fully half of this presentation is going to be dealing with some things that a lot of people find boring. Okay. Which are things like future land use and how we calculate densities and what densities mean and things like that. So once again, if you don't feel comfortable in what she's saying, please raise your hand and we'll try to stop her and have that discussion so she gets feedback. Recognize finally that she's eight hours ahead of us time-wise, so it's very late. But let's just try to be as concise as we can. That's all I have. Thank you. So Ben Northrup is also with us here from the DPZ team. And he's going to be manning the computer slides while Marina starts talking to us. Marina, are you with us?

I am. Can you hear me?

Yes. Great. Ben, are you ready to start? Thank you. Ben needs just a moment.

Okay. Yes. All this thing that you're going to be going over, are we going to get a written copy of all this eventually? I mean, you're going to do a presentation and asking us to listen to it without anything in front of us to refer to. So that can be a little difficult, especially if you're telling me she's going to be speaking kind of fast.

Well, no, I'm trying to slow her down. But that is why I mentioned the beginning. I'm going to be explaining. Okay. Well, let me go ahead, Marina. That's why I mentioned the fact that we had three different versions just in the last week. So I should have mentioned it. The expectation is that by the end of this week, they're going to have another update that is the full one that gets distributed to everybody because they want to incorporate what you have to say today into the next iteration. Since this is a very long document, you don't want to send somebody 300 pages, oh, by the way, that was the old version. Here's another one for you to go through. So that's how they're approaching it.

Well, I'm quite sure the whole I was concerned with the changes that you all proposed and everything.

Okay. All right. So Ben, you want to take it over?

Sure. Well, the comprehensive plan is coming first. So Marina, who's with us on Teams, will present it. And I want to make sure you have a good view of the screen. Marina, can you see the screen, the shared screen? I can.

I can. I can. Thank you.

Okay, let's go.

Yes, and I will say, I will say- I'm sorry, I'm having a problem listening to him. You don't mind. Next time we'll speak. Thank you.

So I'll begin by saying I'm very sorry I cannot be there. I would have loved to and I will be there for the next meeting, but I'm happy to present the gist of what this comprehensive plan is about to you all. We have had conversations and review sessions with your staff who have gone through our recommendations and we've of course taken theirs too and made some adjustments. So as Nathan said, this is intended to be a discussion Feel free to stop me at any time. I asked Ben to actually read the slides. I'm just going to say next so that I can see you all. And if you have questions, I'll be able to answer them. So next. So, this is just a for members of the public. This is just a, an explanation of sort of where we are in the process. We initiated the project about 9 months ago. We took a lot of time to gather the information with our team to go through a lot of the base information that was provided to us, including all the different elements. We had some public outreach, we held a charrette, of course, or a workshop. And then we began to draft the comp plan elements based on what we had heard at the charrette, what we began to draw at the charrette. And we are now at the point where we want to hand in a draft copy of the comprehensive plan. Next. So first, you know, what is a comprehensive plan? So you sitting, all of you sitting around the table, you know what it is, of course, it's your long range roadmap to guide growth and change. And it's intended to turn community values into policy directions because essentially it lists goals, objectives and policies for different elements. It's intended to show or to talk about where growth should go. And what intensities of growth are permitted is intended to to help guide how people will move. What types of housing are needed and how parks infrastructure and services can keep up with that demand as well as how the natural resources can be protected. it's required by law of course as mason mentioned so cities do not have a choice they have to do it but what's important about this comprehensive plan i'll say is that we don't only want to accommodate growth we're really hoping to shape it well that's part of the reason why this is only one of many efforts ben will be presenting after me the downtown action plan but uh we're also working on a form-based code for the uh for the northwest quadrant and the comp plan is your chance to really try to connect the vision with WITH THE IMPLEMENTATION, TOO OFTEN WE SEE COMPREHENSIVE PLANS THAT ACTUALLY DON'T HAVE A PHYSICAL VISION ATTACHED TO IT. WE HAVE A PHYSICAL VISION AND IT'S YOUR VISION THAT WE'VE BEEN HANDED AND WE'VE TRIED TO INTERPRET IT AS MANY OF YOU SAW WHEN WE WERE THERE DURING THE SHORETTE. Now we're presenting this, but it has been a very collaborative effort amongst all our different consultants. And then just as a reminder, we had critics who helped us with the zoning analysis and visualization. They put your entire code into a tool and they put it online and it's helped us enormously to not only understand your zoning, but begin to understand the relationship between your zoning and your future land use. and able to also map out some of the um you know we could tell maps from critics for example show us where villas are show us where the the plots are not built to their total capacity or show us where commercial development is possible or not or not possible so it's easy Easy to see these 3 D, to get these 3 D views. We had on transportation, capital improvements and utilities. Urban 3 for fiscal analysis, and I'm going to be touching a little bit on what they, what they've done. Why to an associate for the marketability study? Of course, you know, what can Claremont expect in terms of growth over the next couple of decades? They tied for landscaping, you know, in their local Monica also for conservation. cgi for civil engineering and stormwater in particular and global five for communication now your comprehensive element your comprehensive plan is organized in essentially two sections the first part is the introduction to the vision which first introduces the context then sort of where we are today uh Because that informs sort of where you're going and then the vision and the framework, which is what I spoke about what that physical vision should be. And then the state mandates that you have. Specific complex elements, and they are listed here. There are 11 of them and the future land use the transportation. I won't read them. You can read them yourselves. You probably know many of them. Of course. And I'll tell you, as Nathan mentioned, a lot of the change is technical. It may feel tedious when you review it. It was really, we went through each and every objective and policy with staff, and we really pushed them to say, if this is a policy you are observing, you are recording, you are following, then we're going to keep it, or you're tracking. If this is a policy that is either expired or no longer necessary, then let's have the due diligence and the rigor to remove it. And now let's see what's missing. So you'll see some new policies, and you will see adjustments to existing policies as well. Okay, next. Next. I won't spend too much time on this slide because you already know it, but before we started the charrette, we interviewed each of you in particular, each member of the commission, sorry, of the council, as well as the CRA. And we just made a list of where there was strong or partial disagreement or where there were multiple opinions on certain topics or how Claremont should evolve. It helped us frame conversations during the charrette and narrow our focus to those issues. uh and the charrette of course was is in february we found it to be engaging we always do there was a constant stream of people coming in residents business owners pouring over our shoulders and looking at what we were doing and also property owners coming with their own projects and showing them to us and saying how can we either make this better or how can we ensure that what we're proposing meets the intent of the comprehensive plan next So, you know, what did we hear in terms of resident concerns? This won't come as a surprise to you. Traffic, traffic, traffic was the very first thing we heard. And of course, citizens are rightfully concerned to be concerned about growth and what it's going to mean to the traffic. Because too often growth is correlated with more traffic, the loss of nature, and the erosion of your small town feeling. And often conflicts arise when those amenities are serving the region rather than locals. We heard that too, in terms of your beaches, as well as some of the festivals that people partake in that are incredibly successful. We heard about limited options for housing, which is important to grow simply because you want to have a greater variety of housing types, not only to allow older folks to age in place gracefully, but also to have housing for the younger generation, not only housing, but quality jobs as well for the younger generation. Next. So, we asked 10 and residents, of course, how they saw themselves and this is what we heard. Lakes hills and trees find ways to preserve those provide what's the sort of the best of town in nature. With where we're going to be accommodating accommodating growth and 1 idea we heard, which we thought was really good was we really want a town center or a neighborhood center in each of the quadrants so that we can capture people where they live. and enable them to walk or bike or cart to those town centers wherever possible so that people do not have to travel a very long distance to get to their daily needs. Of course, preserving the lakes, hills, and trees are key. Small is beautiful. We also heard that loud and clear. Do not increase height in any tremendous manner and retain what's beautiful and unique about Claremont. Staying prosper, of course, has to do with how do we keep young folks, we know the education system is good, but how do we bring jobs, new jobs, open the job market to entrepreneurs that are already in Claremont and wanting to stay there. We've met with some great entrepreneurs in your community. You know them well. We visited a lot of the shops that were that had amazing, not only amazing things to sell, but created these incredible environments. And Claremont Main Street is very active and has some wonderful initiatives that is really bringing Claremont up to the forefront and highlighting the assets of your downtown. Healthy living and wellness, of course, is a key component of that. You know it, you're a town that's rather athletic, that is promoting a lot of athletic activities. For a city of your size, I should say, it's quite remarkable as well. And we want to be able to enhance that in every possible way. And of course, the independent and diversified local economy. So enable the greatest range of people to participate in the growth of your, not only of your downtown, but the city in general. And then I will say manage annexation to control growth because it's been a little bit out of your hands in the sense that you've had to annex certain. Certain parts of the, um, the county, because you've had to provide services for them. So it makes sense to collect the impact fees. The problem has been that. Um, very often you're annexing land that has been that does not meet your code that needs Lake County code. And, um, there is an erosion of nature and it is predominantly of 1 type of housing only. So it does. That's the kind of growth that does aggravate, um, aggravate the, uh. The, the bad sentiment that some people feel when it comes to new growth. Next. the comprehensive plan is essentially um uh framed under four guiding principles the first one is to create mixed use centers where where should those town and village centers be located we're going to show you where those locations are you'll tell us if you think we've got it right to build a connected greenway network that's a really um Big great idea for which is really not only to have this, the chain of lakes, which Ben will show you specifically starting in the downtown and connecting those for carding and for biking, but also really connecting to the greater regional network. And there's a real possibility to do that promoting, of course, complete and enduring places. So where can the where. How can we increase the housing options in ways that don't alter the character of neighborhoods, but do offer those additional housing choices and, of course, advanced healthy living through the easier access to parks and trails and recreation. Next. This is great the way I'm seeing it on your screen. I don't know how they're doing it, but it's fantastic. So Strong Towns participated in the charrette. You're probably familiar with them. We were very happy to have them with us for a few days during the charrette. And they really advocated for incremental development to allow for Claremont to grow and adapt through small manageable investments rather than the large high risk projects that many cities are keen to take on. That approach not only builds local wealth, but it can respond to the changing needs of your community and gradually strengthen your downtown and your neighborhoods over time. As I mentioned before, it's also about allowing the larger pool of residents and entrepreneurs to invest locally and get involved in development too. And of course, expand housing opportunities in a way that is completely contextual and that does not disrupt what you currently have. Next. Now, we also had Urban Three with us who gave, Joe Manicuzzi was with us and he gave what many told us was a very compelling presentation on how cities can use land more productively. And they showed many, many different examples of different uses and then the actual revenue This is revenue tied directly to your property taxes that the city collects from approving different building types in Claremont. And you can see the spikes. Those are the areas that are the most productive in Claremont. And what this does is really help highlight issues and helps people understand the financial implications of different development choices. And it helps focus us on where does it make sense to encourage the many different building types that are needed in Claremont? Where does it make sense to keep places the way they are? And where does it make sense to intensify growth in certain town centers? Next. And lastly, we heard from Peter Bezeli of Whiteman and Associates who conducted a market research for your housing needs. And they identified for us not only what types of housing were needed, but in which types of environments in particular. So maintaining zoning flexibility as one example is about, you will see that when Ben and Liz present the form-based code, how you can do that with a transect-based code, which is much more permissive in terms of users and building types insofar as it fits the general parameters and dimensional controls that each zone allows. They made a strong case for the townhouses and multifamily and what we tend to call the missing middle, which are housing that's embedded in workable people centered places. So you have, you have a huge. Amount of single family and all sorts of shape and then you have the very large multi family buildings and you and you have some garden style apartments, but there's a greater range of possibilities that happens to be to track very well with the demographic changes that are happening. You know, we now are smaller household sites. Young people are getting married later, having kids later, people are living longer all this trends to having. smaller units in certain places. Next. So what became clear to us was in terms of your community vision was that there really was what we call a shared commitment to not only grow with care, but protect what makes Claremont unique. find ways to connect people to their daily lives and create rooms and places for the next generation. This rendering happens to be of the art walk. There's Mr. Strong fellow who has this wonderful initiative and desire to not only Keep so he started a great artwork with some of his neighbors, but they want to see this artwork content connect all the way down to your waterfront. And so you will see in the plans that Ben presents today, different ways in which we've explored how that all can continue in a way. That's incredibly engaging and welcoming. To residents, so we, we've narrowed down the community vision into these 7 principles, which are maintaining your historical identity. Of course, preserving your natural assets. Where should those local centers be? What do we mean when we talk about attainable housing as Nathan alluded to? I will be showing you. I'll be talking to you a lot about housing types and the densities that they produce so that we can all have a clear understanding of what we mean when we talk about certain types and what the implication on the land may be. Obviously, connecting neighborhoods where we can. And that has to do with the Greenway Network a lot, which can really do that in a way that is very deliberate and intentional. And how to forge additional institutional partnerships and encourage local enterprise and entrepreneurs. Next. So when we begin with comprehensive plans, we always begin with, well, what shouldn't change? And most things are not changing in Claremont. So that's the first thing we want to convey, which is what we call these the frozen assets. This is Nathan's term, and I like it because these are areas that are established, they're stable, they have HOAs, and so they're not going to change. They're not going to radically change in any manner. So that's what you see that is red on your screen. The yellow, which is where new growth can be managed is principally your downtown, as well as along SR 50 and US 27. That's where change is going to occur. It's not going to occur in many of the neighborhoods. But what we do see happening are the possibilities of neighborhood centers where there's a lot of residential and not enough sort of neighborhood focused retail in those locations. But we do want to assure you that when you see this, you should rest assured that you're not going to change in very dramatic ways. Next. Another thing, of course, that's not going to change is the idea that what makes you special, your lakes, your small town charm, the hills. We want to enhance those assets. We don't want to change them, so we safeguard them. You'll see that there are... You already had a very strong conservation element. It's been made... You had some very good policies. We've tweaked a little bit of the language, but you know how to preserve this well. And it came through very clearly in the comprehensive plan. And the small-town character, I think you will see that also very clearly how that's preserved when the form-based code gets introduced to you when they talk about the Northwest Quadrant in particular, which is how we can ensure that building types that go next to each other are compatible and meet the street in a way that is how you used to when you see photos of what Montrose, for example, used to be. IT'S ABOUT HIDING PARKING. IT'S ABOUT BUILDINGS THAT MEET THE STREET. IT'S ABOUT ENGAGING PEDESTRIAN FRONTAGES. ALL OF THAT. THAT IS WHAT MAKES YOU UNIQUE AND SPECIAL. AND THOSE ARE THE ATTRIBUTES WE WANT TO ENHANCE. I THINK YOU'LL SEE THAT THE CODE OF THAT. NEXT. Another of those big ideas was, of course, the more robust mobility network. Now, this is a complicated greenway network. We spent time refining it with residents little by little during the shutdown. last week when we had a conversation with one of you who was taking some of these routes and she made recommendations. She was telling us, I went here and I think the road should be on the lake here, not on the street here. And I think we're missing connection here. And I think this connection is not possible. These are the kinds of details that are really going into, because we want to give you a mobility, a greenway plan that is absolutely implementable. So, Here it is. We're going to add street names to it. You'll get a big copy of it. I think Ben says he has a copy of it. But you will see it and we invite you to mark these up so that we can keep making sure we get this correct. Next. I alluded to limiting the suburban sprawl. We know the reasons why. The suburban development often doesn't retain nature, so people get angry when they see it. We know that some growth is going to continue. We know that some annexation will continue. That's just the reality. But what we've put into our comprehensive plans are ways in which, once you begin to acquire land that is of more than a certain acreage, it should be in a form that can encourage more complete communities. You can see here, you're sort of expanding at the same rate as your population, which is somewhere between your population grew five times in about 25 years, and you've expanded by that much. You don't want to expand much more. We understand that often the growth that you've had to accommodate has come in the form of It has complied with Lake County zoning, but it doesn't necessarily comply with yours. So we also made recommendations that any new development that you annex from this point forward should really be in compliance with your code. Because you're going through a big effort to do that, and so it's important that that be one of the policies that gets hopefully adopted. Next.

I have a question on that.

Sure. Marina, there's a question.

Can we adopt and enforce that if the county is also involved? Great question.

By the way, you already have in your documents something that says that when you annex, this is a perfect example of a policy you have in your comprehensive plan that for whatever reason isn't being enforced. It already says, and maybe Kurt or John could correct me if I misstate this, but it already says that you should, that the new development that gets annexed should comply with your code. Not quite sure why it doesn't. One of the reasons Liz has advocated for, that you can encourage that too, is to make your zoning more attractive than Lake County's. So the developers, instead of choosing to go into the county, will choose to come into Claremont, and then you have a better chance of controlling how they develop.

Marina, we have some comments. We have some comments.

Marina, I really, I wanna wake you up on this, okay? it's very simple valerie that was a great question i was going to ask that question that's a great question we do not have any control of what the county does if we don't annex it they're putting it in either way so i want to bring that to your attention am i right valerie is that pretty much spot on what we're trying to say yeah there's no enforcement yes that's my question is how can we enforce that with the county right we can't here's what we

We started doing it in the past to try to force them to give us some say. And when it goes to the county, when you come to us and you ask us something, we say, hey, you have to use our codes and our ordinances. A lot of the developers don't want that because we have less density than they Of course, the county will come back and say, okay, will you provide service? We will still say, no, we won't provide the service to them unless they are fed to our colts.

And that's what Marina's saying about making sure ours is more attractive. Right. Okay, I got it.

Right. So in order to do that, for them to want to really deal with us, we have to do something with our colts, with our density and everything. We've always tried to keep them to our density because our density is a lot less than the county's.

That's right. What the mayor said is exactly right. And, you know, it's been a while that I read your joint agreement with the county, but I'm pretty sure it did say that it really should comply with your zoning. Now, yes, sometimes developers come in, you're forced to provide services, and it's part of the Lake County. But hopefully now with a new comprehensive plan, you can be a little more deliberate about it.

I just want to, rather than, let's correct it. One of the things we found out, they can't force us to provide services anymore. We used to think that, but then we went back and found out they can't force us to provide services, but what happened is if we don't provide services, they can still go to the county and then they can provide their own, do their own thing, okay, and get what they want.

for 30 years and getting more involved because the place has changed. I support everything. I can see it. And I just want to piggyback on that last question. For 30 years, everything that we all cherish, the hills, the lakes, the small town charm, the place has just been overrun and controlled by development. But I appreciate your feedback there, Tim. There's ways if we can tweak our codes through the new comp plan, form-based code, et cetera, if we have more favorable density, perhaps, and maybe we can do it through incentivizing developers. But I've been an independent real estate broker for 20 years. It's mostly commercial and monetized real estate worldwide. I've been a journalist for 30 years specializing in this lifestyle. So I understand what the tail that whacks the dog. My question only is I'm wondering how much of this paradise we have. I live off of, you know, I live in Marbury Gardens. Lake Mejia. You know, Lakeshore Drive is still a little oasis, but my question is how much of the land that I see on these maps, today we're 11,500 acres urbanized, approximately 26, compared to 2,600, we've got a population of 54, I support growth, I'm pro-business, I'm just curious, how much land does the city today, generally speak, control? So I can, so we don't have to worry about I've been following, I mean, I've known most of the county commissioners, the city folks, so I know what's happened here for 30 years, and I'm getting more involved because I'm at a point, I really, I'm excited to, once I've learned what the city has done, invested with this world-class firm, DPZ Co-Design, to, we have an opportunity to create something before we lose this place that 50,000, I don't know about all 50,000, but the majority of us came here versus any other place in greater Orlando for the qualities we all agree. So I'm curious of the land that's left so we can create, I support these green way, more connected neighbors. I love the idea of traditional towns. I'm just wondering, besides the Northwest Quadrant here in downtown, generally speaking, can somebody give me an idea how much land Do my entrusted city officials, all the way down to the PNZ folks, to the city council, do we control right now that without having to worry about maybe annexing and maybe holding somebody hostage, you know, so forth and so on. Can somebody give me that idea?

Thank you. Well, to kind of answer that question, sir, well, really the city basically doesn't have very much land to control. Most of the land is yet to be developed in the city. It's basically mostly in the county. We do have some land somewhere in the city that need to be developed, that can be developed with what I call infield pretty much. Okay, but do the city control it? No. Well, we have some say so in the development because the developers have to come. When I say city control, we don't own it. So we can't control it. Okay, but we can have input on highest development through our polls and through our ordinances and everything. And like I say, even Even in the past, we were forced by the county to provide service because, as she was saying earlier, we must provide services until we realized we didn't have to provide service, so we used that as leverage to try to have some say so. Now, what I'm hearing you say somewhat, it's like you like to increase density and more people is what I'm hearing, where we always took the... point that we want to control the density and not because of the traffic problem. We keep adding all these people and everything, but we don't really add too many new streets to help us with our transportation.

I'm sorry, let me clarify. No, by no means do I support More population growth. From 9,000, I moved here in 1995 from Washington, D.C., the Beltway, some of the worst traffic in America, next to L.A. I support growth, I said. Quality growth. I am huge with sustainable development. I know and I really admire the kind of places that so many people that we have in the city have been a part of. DPZs, Nathan, et cetera. But my question is, 30 years from now, I'm hoping I don't see 100,000 and 50,000 urbanized acres. Because yeah, for the most part, I don't have to work down. I don't have to work. It's number one. I support everything that Citi and DPC learned in their discovery. I am on board 100% with the vision, all of the guiding principles. I'm just being pessimistic, I guess, which is why I ask the question, how much do we control? Because I understand the horse trading with the services, but if I'm a developer, That's a big infrastructure cost. They've been going to the county. My good friend's up there.

Let me see if I can reframe this question. Marina, in the final proposal, or Nathan, of the comprehensive plan, will there be suggestions for what we as council and as city officials can do in order to achieve the seven elements that have been identified? Will there be suggestions by the professionals? Yes, yes, I think that next slide.

Oh, yeah. Can I can I add to your point Allison? Can you just I would like to answer this man's question. If you go back to the previous slide. If you go back to the previous slide, what you see in yellow is what the city of Claremont controls now. That's your city limit. Now, I also wanna say, I don't know, I'm sure you will have read the same articles I've read, but in the past two weeks, Liz has forwarded two articles about how there's a lot of people moving from coastal cities into Central Florida, right? And Claremont was amongst those cities. So people are coming. I'm not saying this to scare you, but I'm just saying there is a, there is a certain amount of growth. You're going to have to accommodate. There is also the fact that there are, and this is why so that we go to the next slide.

Well, before you go Marina, can you yeah, that kind of pocket in the middle of all the yellow. Is going to be served by all of our public safety. and probably I'm guessing our utilities, what would be your recommendation for kind of that pocket and the piece that extends out to the east? Is there any benefit to us in attempting to annex that land so that we have clear boundaries so that people know that they're in the city? Or no, just let it be because it's inconsistent with our vision for the future?

You know, my first gut is to say it would make sense in some level, but we don't know what the zoning is on those parcels. We don't know much about it because it's not in the city, but we're happy to take a look at it.

Which, which, which are you concerned?

We kind of have a yellow donut and then in the middle, there's a whole. with a little piece coming out. Yeah.

Yeah, and we also have to kind of figure out the future. I mean, do we stop annexing and kind of say, OK, this is our limit, and then let everybody else kind of go like you always bring up, wellness way. It could be their own city. So where do we stop annexing?

Well, and at what point do we look the other way when people, I mean, just the extreme example is when people are dying. I mean, when the county approves, Panther Run, I'm just gonna call it what it is, when the county approves Panther Run and is gonna provide county services to a place that has a resort with a 15 minute response time to a heart attack, I mean that's just not gonna fly. So at what point, and this is probably rhetorical, but at what point are we looking the other way and at what point are we saying you chose developer to build in the county and that was your choice and it's not our problem. That's a philosophical question, but it's one that I think is very serious that we're confronted with.

We have already, previous councilors have already looked at things like that. That's why I say we had an agreement with the county. When they come to the county, send it back to us before they make any decision on whether they're going to approve it and let us give input. That was working good up until a year or two ago. Now we don't, a lot of times, like for example, Panther Run. That's all being done. We gave no input to the living and everything, even though it's I think it's going to be hard for us to even try to annex it in because of where it's located. So I think this is going to fall on the county in the future. Unless we make some drastic changes here to be able to annex it in. But I don't see that happening. But you could say the county was working real good with us in the past where they would send projects to us and let us give it a foot. And if they didn't want it, of course, the county would still turn around and annex it in. We don't have to provide them service.

But where do you stop?

Where do you stop?

I mean, you're going to keep going down to Davin, I mean to the, what is it, Caden Crossings? They're all known as Claremont. Are you going to stop there?

Here's the philosophy we would choose. We stop when we're not providing the service. Well, this way, we understand it wasn't really one of those things we really wanted to do, but once we provide the service, yeah, we're going to take it in. We don't want the revenue for it, okay? So that's why we go up back and one of the things we've been doing is annexing all these things that we provide in service for. But if I stop providing service for them, I see no commitment to annexing them. That's me. I don't want to annex any of them. I would not provide services for them.

Your Honor, I want you to respect. You overhear the loans, okay? And you know the insights behind doors, okay? And being sitting there, I've seen everything coming from the county growing. I'm not talking about 2,000 homes. I'm talking about growing. Started with groves on Fortwood Marsh at the end. And then now we've got Panthers Run. That is my biggest fear living in Claremont. When, like Ms. Commissioner Maynard, when does it stop? And that's my question to you. Am I right or wrong? The beginning, I agree with you. When I first came to Claremont, the county listened to us, yes. It seems like, and I'm not trying to start a war between the city of Claremont and the county, because I got my own problems with that. What we think all right started with wellness way how we mostly against it They want to build a 10-story building right next to our own. I Mean my question is am I right or wrong? So she could understand when the county comes in that car coming in with me regular projects. They're coming in with huge projects like Councilman Stranger said, Panthers run is, my opinion, is going to be a disaster. I mean, that's, I mean, it's nice for what they're doing, but hard to clam on? It's going to cripple us.

You're right. And Panther Run is, that's why I went to the presentation. I went to it and I think, wow, this could be humongous. You know, my concern when I looked at it was the fact, are you going to want us to annex this scene? I don't want to annex it. To be honest with you, I'm not sitting here. But then when I look at the rooms and everything in this location, I don't see how we can annex it. It's been well... on our service line, see? So like I say, if I'm not providing service to me, I'm not providing service, I'm not ready to pay next meeting, okay? But I want her to understand that

is getting larger and larger. I'm watching it. From Groves to Panther Run, what's next? That's my question.

So Marina, in your experience, what do cities do when, I'm assuming this has happened before. I mean, has it not happened before? Are we the unicorn or is this something that's totally normal and there's an obvious way to handle it?

No, there's no obvious way to handle it. In Florida, it's particularly complicated by the fact that you've adopted a very strong property rights state, which means that even within your city limits now, let me speak about that first, there's a lot of development potential and development capacity, and that's probably... one of the best one of the best things you have is to encourage developers to be building there now what have other cities done to so the annexation i think it's very it's very important to um to to do a couple of things one is to ensure that you can at least if they choose to annex in that it's coming in the form of communities that can be much more self-sufficient and complete than they have been in the past so that it's not straining your your infrastructure We've seen cities impose moratoriums and use the quote unquote excuse that the services aren't there, but that's only temporary. And typically what happens is that that growth catches up once that moratorium is lifted. It's a desirable place to be. So it's really going to be about controlling where the growth occurs and then really trying to find a way to strengthen your Agreements with the county to ensure that it's it's when you do get growth, it's in a way that that is that is supportive of your of your comprehensive plan goals. And the gentleman that got up from the planning board, I forget his name who kept telling us don't New York, my Claremont. So forget about it. I'm sorry.

Remind me your name.

Okay. So he's right. He's right. You have to find a way to get the county to, uh, to, to, to play ball with you for lack of a better word. You know, it's, it's very unfortunate. So there's no magic bullet, but the thing is that there's a lot of potential within your existing city limits now. So developers were to see that, and if they were to see that they no longer can come in with sort of these sprawling plans, that there's a way to actually stop them, which your joint agreement does speak to, then maybe that will help if you make the development as Liz and the Mayor just said, if you make the density, and I have a whole presentation on density for you all, more attractive within the city limits now.

Everything goes back to my very first question. What is the controllable amount of land?

I'm sorry, point of order, point of order. Point of order.

Go ahead, sir.

Point of order, point of order. Is this a council? workshop, or are we giving public carte blanche to speak as long as they want about whatever they want? Because typically at our workshops, they come up and speak for three minutes. I think he's making valid points, but we're never even going to get through this presentation. And we still have the downtown action plan, and I also heard form-based code. I don't know if that's being talked about. No, no, not today. So I'm just concerned about structure, and so I'm just concerned.

Well, it is We would go through the presentation without any interruptions. I think in the beginning, Mr. North said, hey, we can just stop and interrupt and ask questions at any point during the presentation. I think that's what I heard. But that's one of the reasons I've always said I like to go through things without interrupting because then you get into these type of discussions. I'll jot down the question and ask them an opinion.

Well, I think that they want to hear us. It's just that the question's been asked and answered at this point.

Yeah, we need to get over it.

all right thank you can we go to the next slide so where should that growth occur during the during the charrette that we had that we held we were able to zero in on 10 sites opportunity sites as we call them that um where people expressed an interest property owners residents expressed an interest in seeing these places evolve as neighborhood or town centers So you will see in the comprehensive plan when you get a copy of it, examples of how those places can grow in a way that connects people to all the goals that are in the comp plan. That is, you know, it's within a workable community. It's a mix of building types. It provides for retail uses at grade. It makes sense given the context. These are often sites where the property owners have plans. They came in with their plans. We think we improve them. They seem to like them. So we hope that this may be the start of collaborating with them in a way that can bring, so that when they finally come forward with projects, if you feel that they're compliant with the comprehensive plan, you can support them and see them as a good example of how development could occur. Yes, Alison.

Are these in an order or is this just numerical?

No, sorry. They're not in an order at all. It's not to say that the downtown connecting Montrose to the waterfront is number one. We just happen to list them in this order for, you know, we could list them from left to right, from up to down. There's no particular order at all. Thank you. And this is not exhaustive either. There may be others that you all help us identify. Next. And here's an example of 1, right? So we knew what this is the Waterbrook site. Yes, this is the Waterbrook site. It's at the corner of 50 and Hancock. It's 1 of the 3 town center locations we've identified in your comprehensive plan and you can see there's a range of possible residential commercial options. There was a, there was recreational facilities proposed. There's trails. There's a boutique hotel and. the different colors represent different different land uses we made sure that it complied with the zoning and the and the and the the flu so that's one thing that's uh that that was important and we wanted to use the land wisely and to plan it in a way that is uh that is efficient and not wasteful of the land that you have next here's one rendering of it you can see this happened this is the continuous trail around the lake with you know an ample promenade for all your lakes are huge and they're beautiful and they are and they can accommodate this this type of uh growth and this kind of development uh with those with those amenities that are very much woven into the fabric of the neighborhood uh next And this is an example of an aerial that we believe does development and conservation well. It may scare folks, but we think it's a better proposal than these pad sites that come surrounded with parking. You can see the buildings are shaping streets. You can see the building, and this is how Claremont developed initially. And you can see that mix of building types that exists here as well. Next. So now to get to the comprehensive plan, when you get a copy of it, you're going to get, this is the way we began to track changes. When we first began to review every single element, we looked at each goal, objective and policy in each one of them, read them and suggested either that they should stay the way they are, that they could accommodate a little bit of change, that they should be deleted entirely, or we would propose new policies. So we have it tracked this way, but we've also given it to the county in a word document that just literally strikes out what we're proposing be deleted and adds in what we're proposing to be added. So you'll see that it's a very easy document to read. We give it to them with track changes. They've given us comments back. We're making those changes and you'll get a clean copy as well as one where you can see those changes so that you can be very aware of every little change that was made. Next. Now I'm going to, as I mentioned before, I'm going to end my presentation on talking about density because that is the most, what was likely to be initially the most controversial topic because we're proposing that you calculate density in a very different way. And I'm going to explain the reasons why. And this is why I would encourage you to stop me and ask questions as you see the slides because it's an important concept and it is the most radical, calculation we've done in your flu. As I mentioned before, a lot of the rest of the changes in your different elements have to do with tweaks, have to do with removing regulations that are in your comprehensive plan that don't belong in the comprehensive plan, but actually belong in zoning. Very often cities put regulations into their comp plan because in their mind it's harder for developers to ask for variances, but it makes for a messy comprehensive plan. So you'll see that when things are stricken out, we say place and zoning, place and zoning. But When we began to look and understand at what your density was, we realized that this is not uncommon, that there's a discrepancy between the density assigned and the building types that you permit. So what we've done and you'll get this in a large chart. You don't have to read this now because it's not as if you're voting on any of this, but we took your flu categories, we listed what the heights were, we listed what the densities were, we listed all the zoning categories that appear in each of the flu. When you see a flu grayed out, it means, when you see a zoning category grayed out, it just means there are few examples of where those zoning categories are included in that flu. The ones that are black are the more typical ones. And then we proposed, renaming them. We're proposing new densities and I'm going to go through that and proposing different heights. And you'll see that there are places where the heights are actually lowered, but you're going to see that the density is higher and I'm going to explain why. Next. So the very first question I'm going to pose is asking people, if we were to ask people in the room to define what is density, we would get very different answers, including how community members understand it, because too often people tend to associate low density with good, high density with bad, but you can do low density very well or very poorly, and you can do high density very well or very poorly. so we try to get cities to not think about and residents in particular not to think about density because it's a hard concept to grasp and to actually start to think about building types but there's also many different ways cities interpret density is it units per acre is it gross or net how does it tie to the far very the far is the floor area ratio which tells you the development capacity on your parcel very often they're not correlated Is it measured by population density? I'm here right now.

I'm here right now. I'm here right now. I'm here right now. I'm here right now.

I'm here right now. I'm here right now.

I'm here right now.

I'm here right now. I'm here right now.

I'm here right now. I'm in a city right now where they measure population, where they're doing a comp plan and they're measuring the density by people per square kilometer. Now, that's even, in my mind, worse because that's impossible to understand. Does it relate to commercial intensity or not? In addition to that, there's lots of other metrics that factor into density. What lot coverages and setbacks? provide sometimes will preclude a developer or a property owner from reaching the density that's listed. Sometimes high limits will preclude it. Sometimes minimal maximum loss sizes will preclude it. And very often parking ratios and parking standards is what further limits density. So it's a complex topic. That's the first point I'd like to make. Next. Now, the other thing I want to say is that density is simply a poor predictor of form. When we talk to community members, we always ask them, don't think about a number because it tells you nothing about what the form is going to be. Think about what are the building types you would like to see here? What are the building types you wouldn't like to see here? And so here's an example of a half acre site All four examples yield eight units an acre, but as you can see, they're very different. One is four big houses on a lot that occupies more of the lot. One is a quadruplex that occupies less of the lot, but includes more units and smaller units within the site. And then the two on the top right and the bottom are sort of the middle ground. One is two duplexes and another one is four cottages. And they're all yielding the same density. Next. Now, Here's another example where it's reversed. This time the density changes, but the lot stays the same. So you have two single-family dwellings at 2,000 square feet each. They're yielding four dwelling units an acre. If you were to do two triplexes, you'd get 12 units an acre, and the units would be smaller. If you were to do duplexes, it would be half the size of the single-family home, but you would get two. And if you do a quadruplex, 500 square feet each, and you get 16 dwelling units an acre. So often density... Density flies in the face of providing more affordable housing because there isn't an incentive for a developer to do smaller units if they can somehow reach the maximum density with larger units. So that's another reason why you're going to see we're recommending changes. Next. And then we show examples to community members. So here's an example. One has a 12-story building on one site. They both occupy 4.4 acres. One has 100 units. The other one has 100 units. It's exactly the same. One has 8% lot coverage because of the parking that's required, and one has 80% lot coverage. If I were to ask you to guess which one has the highest density, I would guess maybe 50% would say the building on the left, and 50% maybe would say the buildings on the right. Next. They're exactly the same density. And I like to show this slide to have people understand that density in and of itself is not a remote predictor of form. Next. Here's another one. You can take a look at these four pictures. It's going to be very obvious which one has the lowest density, which is the one on the right, on the bottom right, and which one has the highest density. It's the one on the left. But if you were to try to guess which one has 74 drilling units in acre, which one is 44, which one is 25, which one is 14, maybe people would think it's the one on the top that has the highest density, but that's not the case. Next. It's the one on the bottom right, bottom left, sorry. Because it's a more efficient use of land and there are multiple units in there that are smaller. It happens to be not too far from where I live in Virginia. When we talk about trying to introduce gentle density into here and in a way that makes sense. So when residents say to us, we want to see more duplexes here. We would like to see more townhouses here. We're happy with smaller multifamily. We're not happy with larger multifamily. Each of those has a different implication when it comes to density. Next. Now, you measure density and in your flu, you measure density by gross density. And it is, some people think it's the most logical or the easiest. It's actually the most unstable because it doesn't tell you about the capacity of the site for obvious reasons. So when you use, when you calculate gross density, you're essentially saying, what are the number of units allowed on this entire site? It may include a lot of wetlands, it may include very few wetlands, it may include a lot of recreational space, it may not include a lot of recreational space, it may include a lot of streets or less streets. Every time, it includes all of that. So it's not a, each site, even if it has the same density assigned to it, could yield very, very different results. The next level is gross net density, which is, and many cities do that too. They say, okay, let's exclude wetlands from it because it's too unpredictable. But now we include the open space, the blocks, the streets, and the amenities. It gives you a density that's typically one after two times what the gross density is, but it's still not as accurate as it could be. The most accurate way to calculate density is net density, which is simply saying, take the private lots, you take out the streets you're providing, you take out the open space, and you just look at Lot size, and you ask yourself, what are the kinds of building types that we want to see here? And so what we've done to your comprehensive plan is say. We want to say we want to, we know through the form based code that there are certain block sizes that are being proposed. for single family, for townhouses, for colleges, for small multifamily, for large multifamily. And so what I'm going to show you now are examples of that. And I'm going to show you what each one of them yields in terms of density, because then you're going to see how we correlated those to your flu. Initially, you're gonna have a shock because you're going to see a much higher number. But the net density is a much, much greater predictor of the ultimate building form than what growth is. And I want to assure you that we haven't increased your density in any way. We haven't said you should be, in terms of the building types that are currently permitted. So we looked at the building types that are permitted in your zoning. And we've looked at what those densities are, which right now they're utterly unaligned. And we've tried to adjust it accordingly. So let's go to the next one, because now I'm going to run you through a series of slides. So here's a small single family house on a 35 by 60 foot lot on a 35 by 100 foot lot. Both of those are decent sizes. We do a lot of places. We have a lot of projects in which we have 35 foot wide loft and actually 25 foot, five foot setback on either side. That's not appropriate everywhere, but certainly it's appropriate in some locations. Next. So that will yield, so we have the metrics for each one of them. You don't have to read them, but I'm gonna tell you, it yields about 18 units an acre. And you can see what they look like. They can be really charming little homes, next. Now there's a standard single family home. Your zoning code says 50 by 100 for what was the T3 lot, right? So that's pretty standard. You happen to have a lot of lots, for example, in some of your downtown neighborhoods that are wide and shallow. That's perfectly fine. They may be easily retrofitable for duplexes as we're seeing some people do, but you also have narrow lots as well. Next. So when you look at examples of what that yields, that's yielding about eight to 12 units an acre, just by looking at the size of the lot. Next, now cottage courts. We've heard college courts are something that people really want to see. And in fact, we saw a few in Claremont themselves, in Claremont. And they're actually older, but they're really charming places. They're great for young professionals, for singles or elderly people. Where I live, we have many of them. And parents can let their kids go out and play on the green without worrying about kids being run over because they don't have to cross the street. And they're also perfect for senior housing because there's a place that people can gather with their neighbors. um it's just always a central space that is uh it's for people who don't want a yard to take care of but they may want a single family home they may want a detached home they don't want to be attached to somebody but that central space is key because it provides them with the open space that they would otherwise have in that backyard next And that yields 30 units an acre. And you can see these are all from our different communities, and they're really convivial places. And when we hear that, you know, I could go give a half hour talk on what social isolation does to people, and particularly elderly people, but it's really, really a critical component of finding ways in which to have housing units that can engage residents in a greater common space. Next. Then we move to the next lot up, which is a duplex. Now a duplex can yield a very different density because you can do a duplex that's vertical, and sometimes they call that a twin, and sometimes you can do a duplex that's side by side, which is the ones you have. Next. Those will yield typically twice the density of a single family home, of course, if they're side by side, but if they're vertical, they can go even more. So we've got a range of about 12 to 18 dwelling units an acre.

And Marina, just to clarify, the densities you're showing are net. Exactly.

They're based on the lot size, exactly. They're based on the exact lot size of the parcel. So here's a townhouse. Townhouses vary in lot sizes. Of course, again, where I live, we have 14 foot wide townhouses, and they're great, but we also have 22 foot wide townhouses for two parking cars. So townhouses are wonderful, especially if they're served by alleys, because the front yard is not consumed by parking. Next. that's easily going to get you 18 to 22 units an acre. You have townhouses that are allowed, of course, in your FLU and in your zoning, but the growth density doesn't match it. So, okay, next. Then you have the small multifamily and there's, you know, we have what we call four packs, six packs, eight packs. Well, let's go to the next one, please, Ben. And in particular, the small multifamily are very compatible with larger single family homes because there's one entrance off the side, as you can see in the drawing there. And then you have one unit on the left, one unit on the right. There's windows on all three sides. You can get cross ventilation. They can be very generous units. We know that on a 60 by 100 foot lot, if, for example, you only require one parking space per unit, you can hit a density of about 24 units an acre. If you require more parking, like one and a half spaces or two, then that density will come down. So when I mentioned that parking has an implication on the ultimate density, that's also true. Next. And we tend to embed these in our single-family neighborhoods often because they can resemble single-family. Now here you're seeing some three-story ones. The three-story ones are six-packs, two units to the floor of the three stories of six, 36 units an acre. Next. Just got a couple more. Still under small multifamily, the eight packs, that's four units to a floor and it can go up two stories, eight or three stories, 12, can be very compact. Next. They get light on two sides now, not necessarily three, but those will yield up to 44 units an acre. If you take that parcel size, which is about 70 by, Next. And then you have the multifamily. And the multifamily, of course, varies tremendously. If it's going to have structured parking, if it's going to have under the building parking, if it's going to have surface parking. But if you take a typical three-story building or a four-story building, next, you're going to get somewhere between 65 to 100 units an acre. So, and that's at an average square footage, it's written in there of 600 to 1200 square feet on average. So you could say 900 square feet as an average for the unit size. Next. So, We took those unit types, we looked at the size of those lots, and we correlated the density to it. So can you go to the next slide? Because this is where it resides. So here you're going to see the new flu map that's suggested on the right. You're going to see the majority of it's not changing, but what we have town centers, that's the brown color that you see here, or neighborhood centers, that's the orange color you see. But here you're seeing the density that this will yield. So if you want the low density neighborhood, as you allow them right now, can easily yield eight to 18 dwelling units an acre. If it's single family, it's eight or nine. If it's duplexes, it's 18. Your medium density, 36 to 65. If it's, if it's been, now the flu has a range because if it's medium density that allows T4, those zoning categories, it's 36 units an acre. Why 36? Because that's the six pack. Which is 3 stories, not anymore. 65 units to the acre is the T 5 is the total zones that can go full stories or 5 stories that gets you a higher density. And then finally, along your corridors and what you currently have zone commercial, which we're recommending because mixed use. Cardinal because. There's only a flu called commercial, but it allows residential. It allows all sorts of uses. So we're just calling it what it already is, which is a mixed use corridor. It shouldn't matter whether people are putting commercial or residential there. And so that can yield anywhere from 65 to 100 dwelling units an acre, depending on how they manage their parking. The height is restricted. We're recommending that the town center be the only places where you may want to allow taller buildings. You'll have to debate the pros and cons of that. We were suggesting maybe up to seven stories, but everywhere else, and you could add benefits to that. So you know what, if we're going to upzone you, which many cities do, that's going to come with a public benefit that you now have to provide us with, because we've just now increased your property value. And then the commercial corridors, which are the mixed-use corridors, could be principally five stories. Next.

can you go back so just one yes I've got a question about that thank you for doing such a thorough job marina but as I sit here I think about our city attorney Christian wah who's here and I think about that the mayor he's always reminding us about live local and how it can up in our you know how things are done it's my understanding that the Florida's live local law is tied to density and how what it allows and so I didn't know Christian if if we know if we if we start showing densities like this how does that get interpreted visa V live local

So I'm going to ask you to hold that question and answer that, and then let's go ahead and get through this presentation.

Okay. I think I have one more slide, but that's a very good question, Nathan. One more slide is just a reminder of what the guiding principles were. And I wanted to put this slide at the very end to say, keep these ideas in mind when when Ben begins to present the downtown action plan, and you're going to begin to see the vision that's tied to the to how you can interpret these. Through a physical vision is tied to to your downtown and when they come and present the phone based code. You will also see that it is a way to preserve your historical character, your local businesses and the family friendly atmosphere that everyone is is promoting. One more slide. You know, we've seen this quote. Liz, I think, started or finished her presentation last time on this wonderful quote by your town founder. But I hope that once you see the comprehensive plan, you'll see we're not trying to impose a new vision at all. We are really returning not only to your roots, but to what your original vision was. Yes, in a more with no people there, but in a way that can be perfectly charming and perfectly adaptable to the context in which you live. Thank you. Now I'm happy to answer questions you have.

Mr. Noor, back to your question, I guess. Mr. Wall.

Well, if I understand your question correctly, I mean, live local static, right? I mean, so yeah, what it basically says is that the... If you have a qualifying residential or affordable housing development, it's entitled to the highest residential density that you allow in your jurisdiction. So I don't know off the top of my head what the implications are based on what's been proposed. I haven't looked at the mixed use court or details yet, but I'm intrigued. And I think that it would be entitled to the highest residential density, depending on the project.

But would it be restricted to the areas that are designated for those corridors? Or can they put it anywhere?

Anywhere there's residential, they get the highest residential density.

Well, no. Live local only applies to commercial. Well, no. And mixed use and industrial. It's commercial, industrial, and mixed use. You were saying residential. It cannot go to residential only.

No. What I said was they're entitled to the highest residential density in those areas.

And remember, they went back and amended for live local a couple years ago, and now those three commercial misuse, no, it's basically any property basically on that.

It's not limited to those anymore, okay?

And here's the thing, and it was all my understanding at the time, it applied to the highest density code you had in the city, regardless of the commercial or residential. Matter of fact, we went back to try to combat it. We went back and we changed ours, which is the downtown was at 25 per acre. We went back and changed ours to 15 per acre to try to combat the local. It didn't work for us, really. Okay. So, because we changed it after the live local came in. Well, I guess it didn't work for that one project because we changed it and they had already started paperwork on the one project, so they ended up being able to use the 25. And that's the one piece that Mr. North is always referring to, the 10 acres that's out in the Lincoln Park area that the developer wanted to develop that under that 10 acres. What is it, Mr. North, out here in Lincoln Park? That's under Live Local. And he was able to get his 25 acres per year.

Could we control that through doing a form-based code for the whole city? Would that add some controls onto anything Live Local would try to override?

I want to follow up on that.

Yes.

Because the form-based code is to be an overlay could we say you can have this density if you build consistent with the form-based code, and might that address liblocal?

So that's an interesting question because my understanding, I'm just spitballing, liblocal is a huge thing, but my understanding is that it doesn't entitle you to the density that is achievable through bonuses. So you can create, I think that's kind of what you're talking about, different kinds of incentives and bonuses that you get entitled to. You don't necessarily get those automatically with a development. It's just you're entitled to the raw highest residential density in the code so for example if there's some system through the code that says if you do XYZ you're entitled to this higher density bonus that doesn't necessarily carry over to the live local project if that makes sense I'm sorry if it doesn't. Can I add something to that?

Sorry, I don't, I don't mean to interrupt. I just don't see you guys just 2 things. 1 is remember that with the local. You also go to the highest height, but you're not, you're not going to have anything taller than. 5 stories, right? So they can't go taller than 5. As your attorney said, if you were to bonus up for the extra two, that's not an entitlement. So the height is part of that. My question is, and that's the question for the attorney, is if we're calculating density in a new way, which is moving from gross to net, presumably whatever gets done in the city would follow the same calculation of density.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, is that a question or a statement?

No, I...

it's a presumption but it would be nice if you could confirm it i think that's accurate no i mean i i look honestly this is the first time i've ever heard of the term net density um so this is new for me in in hearing about it but i think you know that if we use net density calculate it that way and define it accordingly then yeah it's it's all going to be based on that makes sense

I have another question. When we look at the map that shows potential town centers and neighborhood centers, my question is if I'm thinking about, I want to know if I'm thinking about Claremont's future development correctly, and the way I'm starting to think about it relates to a term I recently learned, which is a polycentric city, that London is a polycentric city, I think. Am I using it right? Yeah.

Yes.

Different centers. In other words, as I think of Claremont on a map, and I look at the map from 1884, I often, on those giant maps, put my hand up, and my hand only covers old Claremont, but then there's all this other Claremont, and You know, so I think how many hands could I put on the map? And that's probably not a great way to do it, but it visually works for me. And so am I thinking of it correctly that the goal is that everywhere You know, you want to kind of a hand size. Walkable city, and that's where these neighborhood and town centers are coming from. Is that what we're doing?

Theoretically, yes, I think that's a very, it's a very, it's a very nice way of looking at it. You would be a mini, mini, mini polycentric city, because, you know, it's essentially polycentric cities, establish centers in different places where the jobs and the housing can be centered around those areas. and then everything else in between is less important. So it is exactly that idea that you have neighborhood centers and or a town center in each of your quarters.

Well, and how do we feel about that? I think that's important for us to deliver to DPZ.

Well, doesn't that look kind of like the villages? Like Brownwood, Spanish, Springs, Lake Sumter Landing. They have those squares.

Are they as big though? I think we have towns. Whereas they might have villages, which is probably why they're called the villages. But I don't think we have as many. I mean, I haven't looked at the villages on a map compared to Claremont.

They have some very nice centers, but relative to the overall population development, they're pretty sparse.

Can you hear me?

But there aren't many relative to the overall expense of the development. There aren't enough centers.

Can I say something? Okay, so that's one of the core ideas behind the comp plan and everything else was dealing with traffic. The way to deal with the traffic was with the town centers. If you put the town centers all in the different quadrants, then that's keeping people off 27 and 50. So that's important. Theoretically, if we were starting from scratch and you had these centers, it would also give people closer access to nature if you concentrate the development. But if you allow development everywhere, it's not as strong. But we can essentially benefit from the traffic. benefit just on the fact that I don't have to go on 27 or 50.

Each one of the areas would harness the traffic instead of everyone being on a stream.

Right, so the development serves as an amenity for what's around it. And that's what we haven't been doing as a city, is that most new development doesn't serve as an amenity for the neighbors that are there. And if we reconceive of the quality of what we're doing, that's the advantage.

The key word you used in there, starting from scratch. That would be great if we would start from scratch. I understand the concept and I totally agree with that, but the problem we have here in Claremont, because all this development had gone on, we didn't develop on that philosophy. So how do you go back and Where do you go back and say you're going to put a town set here that this quadrant and everybody here be able to walk to a benefit from? You just change the rights.

You give an incentive for them to redevelop along the corridors. We have a few places where you can go from scratch. But you're right.

Nobody's saying it's simple, I think.

It's not an exhaustive place, but where we did designate your town centers is where you already have a commercial zoning. So we haven't, quote unquote, up zoned areas. We haven't suggested up zoning anything, just to be clear. But where we are suggesting neighborhood centers is where it makes perfect sense to do that. No, you passed it, actually, Ben. But you know, I could email you the map and you could pull it up if you want.

Yeah. Right, there it is.

So the three town centers is the Waterbrook site, the Citrus Tower site, and the university site, the LSSC site for now. And then you have many more neighborhood centers.

Can you tell me the difference then between a town center? Okay, so you said town center and then there's neighborhood centers I remember saying wellness way and the arc and then something near Hartwood Marsh.

Yeah wellness waves is its own is its own system Yeah, there it is. There's the drawing So you have your downtown of course, right? Then you can see the 3 neighborhoods, the street centers are the ones. And then the small neighborhood centers are places where we know that there's a lot of residential housing. So, for example, the recreational center. That is, um, that's across from Kings Ridge. There's a lot of available land there where you already have your, your community center where you have your pickable course, and you have the residential, the senior housing. And down at the base, you have a lot of a lot of commercial uses. That's a place that could naturally identify as well as 1 of your neighborhood centers. It's just at a smaller scale.

I think it's worth pointing out on the frozen assets map that in this version, the red are closed subdivisions. Those are unlikely to change very much. There's a lot of commercial land along the 50 and 27 and then throughout the downtown area that is eligible for redevelopment. Those can become various sizes of centers where there's a large town center, small neighborhood center. Those could serve a lot of those areas.

I think about the Citrus Tower Plaza, for example. That is going to be ready for redevelopment soon. It's been developed, but things are in a long 50. I think of like the Winn-Dixie Plaza, for example, things like that, where there's so much parking that's not being used. And if we're changing our code, so all that's not required, it's going to become very appealing. And then if we're getting ahead of it with the development and design center, with good design concepts and things like that, supporting developers at the start, it creates opportunity. It's not all within our perfect control. But I think the opportunity is there. And I love the idea of the town, neighborhood, village centers. I think people want that, and we can work towards that. It's not going to look exactly how we maybe have it lined out here, but what can we do to facilitate that?

Valerie, I understand exactly what you mean, but the reason why that's a bad intersection too. And if you start developing on that parking lot that you say is huge, it's, help me out, that's your part of that in the woods. The reason why it's flowing and barely flowing is because of the excess parking lot. You start, and look, you come up with great ideas.

The traffic's flowing because there's extra parking? Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, you put more buildings there, there's going to be more traffic. That's what I'm saying.

Traffic isn't flowing as smooth as you think out there. That's exactly what I'm saying. It's not flowing as smooth as you think. You go to somewhere, especially around the Winn-Dixie Plaza. We've got a real serious problem along Winn-Dixie or what's that, Bloxham and Armourn Boulevard. There's a serious problem out there. They need to drop over on the other side of Bloxham.

That's the reason why we're creating these town centers in every single quadrant so that the traffic doesn't go to that one.

You add more traffic and more cars.

Let me see if I can help. Marina, do we have in our studies and research any way, I'm going to ask a question, I'm going to preface it with, the average cost of a home in Claremont is upwards of $400,000 to $500,000 now, today. And we've grown.

Four to six.

Four to six, okay. That only improves my point further. We've grown more in the last 10 years. than we did in the 10 years prior which means claremont is filled with people who have the intelligence resources or jobs that can afford them those houses and these people are leaving claremont so that's causing traffic so my question is do we have a way in your research of knowing what are those jobs that 26,000 residents are leaving the city to go to and can we attract those jobs to the city so that people don't have to get on 15 and 27 to go to those jobs? Do we know what those are?

I'm hearing what you're saying.

But can we verify that with the research?

That's my question. That's a good question.

And I hear what you're saying. My question to that is the fact that, go back to how much land do we control, how much property do we control in this city? Where do you have the land to be able to put industrial and commercial that will attract that kind of employment?

But the first question is, is that accurate? Have we been able to verify what jobs it is people are leaving Claremont to go to? Have we done a study? Have we done a survey? Is there any way of knowing what these jobs are that have people leaving Claremont? Does anybody know?

The easy answer?

Yes.

Orlando is the number one visited location in North America and arguably in the world. 70 million people have been going More and more every year. Come to Orlando to the vacation travel world. It's Disney World that employs 50 to 60,000. It's Universal's just added the other multi-million on the podcast. It's the space code. It's all the other wonderful things about Orlando.

70 million plus.

We surpassed New York City years ago. I always joke in the Greek, the financial crisis in 2008, the only people from around the world who came on vacation to Orlando, it was over 40 million. The answer to where they're going, they're service-oriented jobs. They're the hotels, they're the convention centers. It's all the entertainment, the Disney World, the Universal Studios. And then the second largest employer was my wife's former employer, AdventHealth. Those two have employed over 100,000. Now, thankfully, We support, and last time I came in the city hall was when I supported the emergency hospital to come on the 50, much to the chagrin of Claremont didn't want to have another hospital here. But lo and behold, we needed that. And I'm sorry about the one in Minneapolis. So now there's a lot of great jobs here.

I'm healthy living is kind of minimize the traffic, as Nathan said.

I don't know if we can create as much industry, but we're starting with health care. We're starting with some other ideas. I'm all about this healthy living that involves the neighborhood center because besides going back and forth to work, we're now spending so much time just going down 50 to go and shut up and die. I hate to use winter garden. I would want to stay here inside my little zone, three or four mile radius. Thank you.

But that's part of the answer there. The other thing is a lot of the jobs, the people I talk to going out, it's more in industry, other type of industry. So do we have the capability to provide that? the kind of job opportunities here.

That's where the conversation comes in too, though. It's not about big industry. It's about the small business and entrepreneurial development. This is where all these things come together. The comp plan is a long game. holistic approach to how our city grows so none of it is going to be easy no some of it may not be intuitive some of it may go the slow way so we can get further eventually and that's what i think of with some of the stuff like whether it's town centers or the the kind of business plan which the entrepreneurial aspect is not represented in the four big principles of the comp plan i noticed but um in my mind that's where it all it all fits together like this is we need to work towards something we have to accommodate growth somehow and we can't keep doing it how we've always been doing it and these town centers are real opportunities but it's a long side it has to be alongside of yeah it wouldn't happen overnight you start with the comp plan then you have the code and then everything and it's big picture and it's a lot of different inputs all working towards that.

And I think one of the big concerns, of course, one of the concerns that I always had is what can we do, a job opportunity to bring the people back, bring our people back here, and to keep the people off the road, work right here in the area, the work and play areas. That, to me, is the biggest thing we need to be looking at in trying to figure out that piece of the puzzle.

And I think that's been a part of some of the conversation, but it could be better represented maybe through the comp plan. I don't know if that's the appropriate vehicle for it.

But I think that's huge the the town center concepts. I don't know if I should say polycentric city I want to be coached on it. So I'm saying the right thing but If that's I mean, we're the ones who need to weigh in on this everybody in this room and I think that We owe it to each other and we owe it to the design team if we have questions, concerns, or comments about that theory. To me, I heard two things that were significant. One is your current code doesn't match your comp plan. We knew that. Okay, so we're fixing it. But the other is this polycentric city to help address traffic. That requires density. That's going to be something we all need to be on the same page about because we're the ones talking to the public and communicating this. So, I mean, I feel like I'm at a wedding. Speak now or forever hold your peace is kind of where I'm at on it because I think that this is a big deal and I don't want to get a month from now when we're coming to the final and I say, well, we didn't think about it or we changed our minds. Or we can change our minds, but if there's something we know today, I think we owe it to each other to talk about it today.

Could I point out the obvious if I may speak real quick? Okay. May I hit on something which I'm in agreement with? Think about it. You're talking about Disney. You're talking about the attraction parks. Okay What are they really paying right? Okay, they're not paying that much so exactly on his page Bring that pay scale Claremont Okay. Now we have the room for it. That's why we're here. But just to say we got trapped because of Disney, they're going. I don't buy that. I'm sorry. I just don't buy that. I think it's just over. It's too much density. It really is. Okay. And that's where I agree. because i'm i sat here and i'm listening disney disney disney i know this i know what disney pays trust me i can get better jobs if i go to orlando that's what it's really about so let's bring that market like he wants to do to Well, I'm sorry. I just want to point out the obvious. I'm sorry.

Yeah, you're right. And as I think I said before, you're right about the medical industry. That is one of the better paying industries right now. And so, yeah, I got crucified. But when we, as he said, when we bought Advent Health in here, a lot of people didn't like it. But I saw his job opportunity. That's one of the things I look at all the time. And one of the things I'm really so thrilled about or nervous about all the commercial down there and the job opportunities that it's supposed to be bringing, especially in the medical area. When I heard they got 175,000 square feet of medical building that's already been proposed down there, that excites me because that's good pay. When I know AdventHealth on 250 acres down there, It excites me because I'm envisioning them putting another hospital down there very soon. I know it's going to be 2030 before they do it because there's a cell phone tower on the priest's property and they at least don't run out until 2030. But then when I talk to AdventHealth, every time I talk to them, that same thing I ask, when are you going to release the fact that you're going to put a hospital down there? Because I'm trying to encourage that because that's good paying and with our senior population here, medical is very important.

Can I go to the town center? I think what the town center supports is an entrepreneurial economy. There's many businesses that want to come downtown right now. It is the only central place for business, and this would allow other centers that people can easily access. So I think We're talking to the future. We're really looking long in the future. I mean, I disagree with some of the comments. I think the big people right now, it is. It's Disney. It's Universal. It's Advent. It's those people now. But communities that are trying to have sustainable growth across the country are trying to have entrepreneurial economies. I just went to Fort Collins, Colorado a couple weeks ago, and it's an entrepreneurial economy. They support local. They don't want to go to chains. They want to go to local places, and you need to have pockets for them. So I think it's looking visionary. It's in the future. We can't recreate. We're not going to have a Disney here. And they're very active in our community. They do a lot in our community because this is where they're in. And we're not trying to take away from that, but I think in the long range, if we're building for the future, we need to have these pockets that we can serve this growing population. And just having one downtown center probably, as we continue to grow, isn't going to cut it. So I think it's very important to have these town centers and have different places that the entrepreneurial economy can exist.

On that note, Marina, we talked about small town feel, I remember saying, but was small business part of the comp plan? I don't remember seeing.

Yeah, I mean, you know, Yeah, you know, too often we speak about affordable housing in smaller units. We tend to forget to speak about smaller workspaces too. And, you know, your downtown has a lot of good things going for it. So, for example, you have very, very small plots that can redevelop by virtue of the fact that, you know, for example, they don't have to provide that parking on site. Um, et cetera, so the small, so enabling small workspaces too, is as important as affordable housing and the code was going to make that much easier to do.

So that's already contemplated in the code.

Yeah. In the comp plan. In the comp plan. In the comp plan, one of the seven principles they had in the beginning was an independent and diversified local economy. So it just wasn't prominently.

I just needed it to be dumbed down. Thank you.

And I think if we think about downtown, while I absolutely agree with the different centers, the downtown is also our tourist area and also our event area. So it's a uniquely distinct town center where The one that publics at 50 and 27, that Citrus Tower area, that's a service center. It serves the community. It's not walkable. If you're on the west side of 50, you want to use the downtown area.

But it's about two things. I'm glad we're not going after a whale, because we don't need a whale. When people depend on a Disney,

And Disney goes south, everybody's real hungry all of a sudden. So with this, we can take hardship a lot better.

But I have five different city centers, but our downtown, I always think of it as our, it's our photograph opportunity, it's our events, it's how we promote us, you know, it's the gem of the hills.

But the one down, you know, down near Vince's area, we go down towards the Hancock and so on, those serve the community. I have a shopping center, doctors, get my nails done, get my hair done, all those things. And I can walk, drive, or bicycle too.

And I agree with the town centers and everything, and I think she mentioned in her presentation is the fact that Claremont was originally built on that philosophy. Right out there in the same area that we're talking about, Winn-Dixon and everything, we had our little town centers and everything when I grew up here. We changed our codes, our ordinance, and got away from that. We took out our little stores and mom-and-pop stores and everything in the community. That's right. Yes, we used to have mom-and-pop stores in the community. And that's what I've been saying all along. Most cities in the country were built on that philosophy, very strong town philosophy. And somewhere back there, we changed our concept and our philosophy and started putting homes all out there, creating traffic problems and all this here, because now to go get a loaf of bread, you got to drive five miles. Right. Okay. Where it used to be when I grow up, moms ain't need loaf bread. I ran around to the corner store in two minutes, came back with a loaf of bread. Right. Okay. So I agree with the concept. But my question is, we talk about keeping people off the road. How big of a town center that we going to be able to put out there and get well enough paying job that we can support thousands and thousands of people in that center? That's why I'm saying not just the town center. We have to develop some kind of industrial somewhere else along the way to help support these people. Because you're not going to build a town. You can take downtown as you mentioned as a town center. How many people you got employed in the downtown area?

well i think if we're spreading it out like they're proposing i mean that's a lot that's a lot of investment that's a lot of business space it's a lot of commercial space i mean I think this is very ambitious. I'm interested, you said something, Tim, that makes me wonder, is there, because I know we're going to see pictures of the historic downtown, and we saw Waterburg, and that was very cool. Is there anything related to, or could we get, or do we want something related to each of these neighborhood centers, town centers? Because I hear the words, and I see the math. But I'll tell you, when I see the picture of Waterbrook, I think, well, my daughter would like to live there. She just moved out, and she'll be moving there. Sorry, she'll be leaving your neighborhood. But that's where she would choose to live as a young adult. And I think it would help people have a better understanding myself included, if we could see what each of these spaces potentially could look like. And when we start talking about density, I don't think when we use that word, it is like development. Those two D words are like cuss words in Claremont. But if we can say, well, I like this map a lot. And if we could say, here's a cross-section of what that one might look like, and here's a cross-section of what that one might look like.

Another way of asking it might be, what's the closest analog? I mean, what's the closest example to what's being proposed here? Yeah, so we don't have to draw it from scratch. I'm just curious because I did see on a bunch of slides there were a lot of different communities that were For the different densities and types of but I'm curious are there Like in in terms of DPZ's vision for what this could look like are what's the closest analog that it has seen?

I love that question Yeah, we can provide imagery that helps you sort of visualize with this different range of possibilities. It's a huge range, huge continuum. Historically, the towns grew from a small little hamlet to a village to a town to Manhattan, you know, in some cases. And there's sort of everything along the spectrum. But it's not just big town centers. A neighborhood center can just be a corner store. If that helps take care of a few of your daily needs, not maybe every daily needs, but if you don't have to drive five miles to get a gallon of milk.

Right. But the mixed use, when I was in Colorado, I visited Prospect Newtown, which was one of the first ones BPZ worked on. And it's the mixed use. It's not all retail. There's offices. There's everything that supports it. And it's kind of what you see downtown. I mean, you have the attorney and the architect. You have all these different things. And they all come together.

And that's why you need the residential.

Prospect Newtown.

Let me try to answer it real quick. There's different flavors of what a town center or neighborhood center can be. And one example would be DBZ did the first what they call suburban retrofit of just a strip mall that was built in the late 50s. called Mashpee Commons, okay, up in Mashpee, Massachusetts. Okay, so that's an example where you take an existing shopping center and they were figuring out what should we do different? And they said, why don't we be more like the charming town village centers that we have in New England? And so that's been very popular. Then you have another case where they had a suburban road going through Huntsville, Alabama, and it was connecting different subdivisions, but there was a little area they could do. DBZ did that plan. where they created a village center that then morphed, even though they designed it as a three-story area, now it's up to eight stories, and it's become a real hub in Huntsville, Alabama that's growing very quickly. Then you have smaller ones that are more remote, let's say, that were also new, that they've designed, like in Haversham, that is an amenity to the surrounding rural area there, Or you go to a place like a resort, like you've been to a place like Rosemary Beach, and they do a Main Street. It's in a new place. So they're all different varieties and sizes, but the design for the context is what's critical. In other words, we could have horrible town centers or good ones, but it's going to come down to how you ultimately design.

Yeah, so for purposes of moving us on, the way that I heard Christian's question and for note taking for the final draft that comes to us, I would very much appreciate if each of these town center neighborhood centers had one to three examples of what that might look like based on what's already there. With the inventory that DBZ has at its disposal of all the things that have been done, as we look at each one of these, some of them are greenfields, some of them are retrofit, suburban sprawl repair. Like, what would be examples so that we're not having to wait for drawings, but we have pictures for imagery? I mean, you guys did that at the show, right?

Yeah, we did that, and I guess, Marina, are you still on the call?

Yes, yes, I'm still here.

I wonder whether it would just be worth showing some of 10 special area plans, they kind of take a whole range of different possibilities within Claremont. We show what you could do. Right.

Yeah. So that when we get the draft, I would love for that to be included. Yeah.

I think that's very reasonable.

Yeah. I mean, you had a design for three sisters and you had a design for the wellness section there. You had another design for seven. All right.

Brian, you had... Well, I...

There is data, to go back to the data point. The Orlando Business Journal, every time that comes out, there's data about industry, employment, where people are going, where it's being built. LEED has data. Lake County, I've heard them present Lake County Economic Development when they talk about the, what is it, 70% leave the county for work. There's data as to where they're going. So we have traffic data. I also think that a lot of this really comes to a shifting focus. Claremont was I've heard Nathan, Mr. Norris, talk a lot in the community meetings about what did Claremont used to grow. Claremont used to grow tomatoes. And then Claremont grew citrus. And then we started growing residential homes. But what is our next chapter? For the longest time, I think that there was a general, maybe begrudgingly, but a general acceptance that we are a residential community, that we don't have what it takes, or maybe we don't want to be, or whatever the reason. I'm not passing judgment on that, but I think there was just this impression that we weren't the place where people worked. We were the place where people lived. It was safe.

And I think

That's not bad, but we have to acknowledge the fact that if we want to be something different than that, that's a shifted focus. That's actually a – I've talked a lot about maturity and maturing as a city. That's a, hey, are we really leaving behind – that grungy look maybe that we had when we were in the 80s and 90s and we're moving into a little bit preppier look with our apparel. When you're growing up, you kind of do that. What I wore when I was 18 is not what I wear now at 51. And so our Claremont 30 years ago may not be where we want to be Claremont today or in 30 years, but how do we get there? What does that take to acknowledge that shifting focus. The other piece... What do you see? We also have some opportunities to capitalize on this entrepreneurial and small business... Small business capital of the world. Small business capital of the world. I still haven't trademarked that. Some ways to do that, but also to be complimentary to what's around us. We don't have to have... Orlando has all of these coming and budding Michelin star restaurants. They do. Tampa is getting a restaurant seat. It's not just Miami anymore in Florida. But where are the incubators for those?

Mm-hmm.

I don't know that there is one. Could we, if that was something we wanted to do, could we do something that would be complementary to that that would put us on the map that complements what else is going on? It doesn't compete, it complements. And we have three of the four Lake County economic development zones within a spitting distance of our downtown. ford park in groveland mineola turnpike and wellness way no other area in lake county has that luxury of having that within our arms reach what could we do to capitalize and complement and build upon that i don't think it's necessarily incumbent upon us to do it all i think it's a way for us to just frame or think about and then if we are turning a page in terms of that next chapter, it was tomatoes, it was citrus, it was houses, what's next? How do we engage the public and share that and sell that so that we all get energized by and want to help collectively turn that page to that next step? I don't have an answer with that, but that's just what I'm hearing and thinking about as we go.

Well, there was one concern I had in our presentation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I heard you say parking to one, change it to one per unit.

No, no, I didn't say that. Parking is just a determinant of density. So Ben can speak to what the parking requirements are in the code, but we're not suggesting that it gets changed. I'm just saying that it's a metric that impacts density, that's all.

No, I thought I heard you say, and of course, some of the units, Diagram you showed one unit.

I showed examples.

Yeah.

I showed examples, but I was, yeah.

Yeah, that just concerned me when you start talking about one, Nine times out of 10 these days, you know, most homes gonna have five and six cars, so where the rest are parking? On the streets and clogging up our streets and everything, see? Which is one of the other things I say to people all the time back in my day. I mean, I'm from a family of 12, mother, father, 14 of us in the house, but we only had one car to get around, okay? Now today, in my house today, I got four or five, and we got five cars. So, so, so... Parking is one of the things I really want to, I hope we really address in this thing because I want to be able to, when I go in some of these subdivisions now and I see people park their SUV or whatever right up to the garage door and they're still overhanging the sidewalk, that is a concern to me because then you've got narrow streets and they can't park on the street. So parking issue is one of the things I think we really need to look at in our comprehensive plan and everything. Okay?

Because the parking is looked at in your zoning code, not in your comprehensive plan, just to be clear.

Yeah. But other than that, anybody else have anything else before we we move on? Because we do have the downtown activation. Ma'am, but I know you, what is it? It's about two o'clock in the morning or so over there where you are.

Oh my goodness.

Not quite, not quite. I'm happy to present. Okay.

Thank you, Maureen.

I'm going to try to stay up and listen to Ben's presentation, but thank you for your time.

Well, thank you, ma'am. Thank you. Anybody need a break? Anybody need a break? Anybody need a break? Brian, you need a break?

How much time do you need? How much time do you need to set up?

It's up to him. I'm going to change files. Five minutes is good?

Or do we need 10?

Sure. Five minutes.

We need at this lane.

Oh my god, I'm in the turn lane. I've got to stop the traffic. That's what I'm saying.

Yeah. Yep.

Yep, yep. Oh, we only got this top one. That's it, I think, unless they added something. I thought one was denied. I thought we were just doing the concept.

Sounds good, have a good night. No, I'm just saying. Okay.

That would work. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. I also thought you said a funny statement. You said the extra part. What's that? I'll take that.

All right.

If you want, I'll go get some vats. I'll bring them down.

That's how you have to get stuff done.

Thank you.

That's not fair.

The downtown activity plan. Who's handling this one? Oh, you're handling that too? Okay. This is the last thing on the agenda, right? Yes, sir.

I'm not just letting you know. All right. So I'm Ben Northrup and I'm with DPZ project manager for the form based code and for the downtown action plan and I'll be presenting our work on the downtown Claremont action plan. So it would be handy for everyone to make sure you have a view of the screen. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to present. Feel free to interrupt and have questions, but I think it probably would be good to get through. Maybe we'll keep the questions short and keep it moving.

Before you start, let me just throw this out there. Mr. Wayne, we've got to do something about putting the screen up here so we don't have to be turning around. All right. Thank you. Let's go. Put it right on that, sir. No, I'm talking about when you sit up here. I know they had the TV taken out because it was all weird.

You're right. 100% right.

DPZ has been engaged to, as you know, to come up with a new downtown action plan. This is in connection with the CRA. So the presentation will consist of two parts, an introduction where we just kind of give the context. You're familiar with it, but we just want to reassure you that we've looked broadly at the city and engaged quite a bit. And if there are holes or things that we're missing, by all means, let us know. And the real name of it is part two is the vision. And then we'll talk about the five big goals. We'll share our master plan, which is the kind of drawn document of the whole thing. And then we'll describe a bunch of broad initiatives that kind of cover the whole CRA. And then a bunch of specific area plans. And then just a brief word on sort of implementations. So part one, introduction, context. The area that we're talking about is this right here. So it's not the entire northwest quadrant. It's the boundaries of the CRA, which I assume you're fairly familiar with. And there you have it. That's the boundaries of the CRA. And the thing to sort of note about it is that it clearly involves all of the waterfront which you consider downtown it also involves most of the waterfront and the plan in 2015 was called the downtown and waterfront master plan and if you look historically the boundaries were expanded at some point to include both sides of 50 so it's really from 50 to And we certainly brought up, should our study be at a different boundary? And there's no real compelling reason to change the boundary. So we're sticking with the current CRA boundary. But that is ultimately enough question for you. Now you already know more than anybody else about the CRA so I don't have to go into sort of detail but the CRA obviously has a mandate to redevelop and reinvigorate downtown and has a number of funding mechanisms to do so and it sounds like it's obligated every so often to come up with a new plan and that's why we're here. You had a very good plan in 2015 and we'll talk about that in a few minutes and how much was achieved and why it's time for a new plan. And this area is very active with storefront renovations. And then there's Claremont Main Street is a very active partner in this, representing a lot of businesses and other stakeholders downtown. And hosting all kinds of regular events that we're aware of, the farmer's market, the wine stroll, the food trucks, a lot of great activity. And then the stakeholder engagement that's been part of our process, as you're well aware, we're sort of building on the work that we've been doing and continue to do with the COMP plan and the form-based code. So lots of visits to Claremont. I'm quite a regular on the Bright Line now, which I enjoy. Actually, I should say I really enjoy it. And we had a Charette, which I think you all participated in and were aware of. That was specifically focused on the form-based code and the comp plan, but it's all so interrelated and so much of the focus is on downtown anyway that we learned a lot that has really informed our work on the downtown action plan. Okay, so existing conditions. Our first thing to do was to come up with our base map. This is not the master plan. The master plan is based on this. This is the state of Claremont and the CRA as it stands today. And this required a fair amount of work Nowadays, with GIS, you can get building footprints, but different databases have very different information. So, sort of synthesizing that, trying to fill in the gaps, and then figuring out what the existing conditions are in natural street states within the rights of ways. It is a helpful document to actually make concrete proposals. There's the core downtown. You're centered on Montrose and the surrounding blocks where it's really kind of main street. There are residential neighborhoods on all the sides and parks and the lakes. There's neighborhoods to the east and neighborhoods to the west. I don't have to describe all this to you. You're very familiar with it. And a really important aspect, of course, is the lakes, the large lakes, Maniola and Minnehaha, but also all the small lakes, which really give such a distinctive character in conjunction with the hilly topography. And you have a lot of nice parks. The historic village records historic building types that existed in the area. And one of the projects that came out of the 2015 plan was to celebrate entry off of SR 50. All right, so then our analysis of the existing conditions. One of the first things we always do is pedestrian sheds. Classically, it's a five-minute walking radius, which you can see in the upper right corner. That's about as far as most people will just sort of kind of intuitively just sort of walk to meet the daily need without getting in their car. If it's beyond five minutes, you tend to hop in your car. So the downtown area is equivalent of about two or three pedestrian sheds. What's that? Three blocks, basically. Well, it's a five minute walk, which is a quarter march. If you look from here, oops. For example, from that center to there is a quarter mile, which is a five minute walk. People walk about three miles per hour, 20 minutes per mile. Five minutes is a quarter mile, give or take.

And you see it's six walks wide at the heart of the downtown. Yeah.

Well, and also from the waterfront park to downtown, which has always been our issue.

It's about 10 minutes.

It's 10 minutes.

Now, five minutes is really a metric for meeting daily needs. People will walk much further if it's a great walk. If you're on a great street and you just don't know who's been to New York City and you walk 20,000 steps and you don't realize until the end of the day. If you create a walkable environment, people will walk. So on the left here is what we call a frontage quality analysis. It's basically assessing what is the quality of the front of the building spacing the public ground. Because that really determines a lot how walkable an area is. And it's very strong here along Montrose. That one block of Montrose is very strong. Elsewhere, there are a lot of sort of missing teeth, parking lots, demolished buildings, empty lots. They've done studies, but you can observe this yourself. People just stop walking as soon as they get to an empty lot. People will walk basically from there to there. Unfortunately, your lakefront is only two blocks away, but there are a lot of holes along the way, a lot of parking lots. You can see the water, which is a big attraction, but it's hard to get people to go there unless the frontage quality is good. So part of all the efforts, especially the form-based code, is to require buildings to make good frontages with visible front doors and adequate glass. I mean, basic things that everyone got right 100 years ago without any rules and not being told what to do. But now we live in a very different world, and you have to sort of code for it if you want to. On the right is a property aggregation analysis. It's just sort of a study of like the ownership of property and looking for evidence of sort of aggregation of a larger loss. And actually downtown Claremont still has quite a kind of diversified ownership, which is great for entrepreneurial efforts. But large aggregations also afford opportunities as long as the form of the building is done well. And that's where the form-based code can really kind of guide and protect. All right, so now I'll just talk briefly about opportunities and challenges. I won't go into detail on these because a lot of them are pretty obvious. But one of your greatest opportunities is the extensive lakefront along Lake Boniola and its close proximity to downtown. I mean, there are a lot of great downtowns in Lake County, but Claremont is unique in having that proximity to the water. And yet, the connections need to be strengthened. And so a lot of what we're talking about is how to connect Montrose down to the water. Another opportunity is just the picturesque hills and lakes. Reena spoke a lot about that. And what more needs to be said? It's beautiful. Another great opportunity is that you now have a reinvigorated core downtown, which, as I understand it, has really happened in the last 10 years or so. So you've made huge progress. There's still a lot of potential and a lot more to do, but that's a real good basis to start with. And then recreation and athletics, I mean, the choice of champions and all the athletic pursuits of all varieties is a real opportunity for Claremont. The coast to coast trail, I mean, goes right through town and there's a lot of talk about how it's the middle of that town. It's called the South Lake Trail where it passes through. One thing that you might not focus so much on is the walkable grid. If you have a street network, and for what you want to do, that is a huge blessing. The advantages are countless. One of them, just at a merely aesthetic level, is just that the straight streets of a grid really show off the topography really well. You really feel the beautiful hills with the straight roads that go sort of up and down. But it provides alternative routes, alternative interesting routes. If there's a little flood around Center Lake, no problem. There are probably a million other ways to get around. Okay, challenges. One of the biggest is stormwater management. The ground is this karst geology, and it's extremely porous, and the water goes straight down. It's so interesting to see all these little lakes without creeks running in and out. For the most part, water just sort of seeps straight down into the aquifer, and so as a result, you're of our treatment requirements are very strong, and you have to set aside a lot of land for treating it, and that's understandable why that is the case, but that's sort of an invisible barrier to development, and we have some thoughts about that. Another one is lack of shade and shelter. If we're encouraging walkability, it's got to be safe, comfortable, and interesting, and a big part of that is shade and shelter. Actually, when we were here last time, we broke out in the rain and walking along the south side of the block of Montrose, you can actually make it most of that one block under the cover. That's the only block, but you can sort of avoid the rain. Underperforming furnitures, we already talked about the blank walls, lack of windows and doors. There are places that could be improved. Challenges. We'll talk a little bit about the parking studies that were done. Parking poses a challenge, although maybe not in the way that people exactly. Maintaining a family atmosphere seems to be sort of really probably more of a goal than a challenge. All right. The 2015, before we go into the new proposals, let's just reflect a little bit on the master plan for 2015 and completed projects. Here's the plan done by GIA. There we go. And one of the first things we did is we did this assessment of the projects and how many have been sort of completed and not. And it's remarkable how many things have been completed and have made a really positive impact on the city. And the city has on its own website a good sort of record of some of the major projects that have been completed. And to highlight a few, one of the most significant is Victory Point, the transformation of West Lake into a stormwater facility treatment that facilitates development into downtown on a kind of a first come, first serve basis, which is really a fantastic project and I think a model for how Claremont could move forward. The boat ramps, relocating those and getting motorized vessels around the east side. I think there's a really great move. It's been very successful. And the art walk has been a tremendous success. Right at Montrose, a delightful connection heading towards the water. And we're not the only ones studying Claremont and proposing things. There's been a lot of studies ongoing, and there are a number of other ongoing plans. And if there are any I've missed, please let me know. There are quite a few. But FDOT has had numerous proposals along SR50 for improvement back about five or six years ago for more ambitious proposals. with center median now they have a proposal for resurfacing and we've kind of piggyback on that and make some recommendations which we'll get into later there's the proposals for East Avenue the complete street study which is a great proposal how to make that sort of overly wide street you know more usable by like by different modes of transportation and provide more shade A lot on parking. So there's already been, Kittleson has done quite a bit. There's this study of six existing parking studies, and one of the first things we did is we looked again at those six sites and made proposals which we'll share those. Not that anyone's saying you need a parking garage on all six sites, but what would a parking structure look like on those sites helps you sort of evaluate whether, which of those might be better or worse. And then we're aware that at this point it's in the hands of the the pig stack committee Parking garage technical Pig stack There have been controversial proposals like this one to put parking on which local residents strongly came out against very strongly. In 2021, there was kind of growing consensus around building a parking garage south of the city hall. And this larger parking study, the conclusions are interesting. The fact of the matter is that on a daily basis there is not currently a parking problem. There are parking challenges during major events. And then there's the long term prospect of as land that's currently leased for parking gets sold and redeveloped, you lose supply and increase demand. And so that's why there's thought about building sort of structured parking. There's the Meet in the Middle Park, an ambitious proposal for a block between 7th and 8th on the waterfront with just about everything you could think of. Amphitheater, bathrooms, marina, and Veterans Memorial. And then there's the VAP study, the Vision Activation Parks and Recreation by Shane Fernandez, completed recently, which was an assessment of the parks, facilities, access to schools, and made a lot of recommendations citywide, but a fair number. which we sort of pick up on and one of the most noticeable notable and I think the origin was his work is focusing on the chain of pearls which we'll talk more about Dick's height is working on proposals for link enhancements and I think the downtown Main Street Claremont has been behind landscape plans for Montrose Avenue and a botanical garden around Center Lake So there's really a lot of good efforts going on. And then DPZ, of course, we don't need to say anything more about the comp plan. We just got a very thorough update on that. And Elizabeth and I have been working in parallel on the form-based code for the Northwest Quadrant. And you'll be hearing more about that, I'm sure, in the near future. All right. On to the vision. All right, so downtown goals. Sort of enumerated as five, and we want your feedback and comments on all of this. Goal number one is increase the vibrancy of downtown. And Nathan, if I miss anything, you're very good at articulating these. But that one I think is fairly obvious. It's already a vibrant place, but there's potential for that to expand and grow into more. And we've also heard a lot of interest in keeping it family-friendly and not being so overwhelmed with certain large, noisy bars. And breweries.

And breweries. And marijuana shops.

Goal number two, and a lot of these are very interconnected. They really reinforce each other. Providing shade from the sun and shelter from the rain. How are we going to expect anyone to walk if you don't provide those things? Goal number three, connecting the string of pearls, which is really about the Greenways network and creating Greenways to connect this wonderful string of small lakes that you have. But really, it's part of a larger Greenways network, and I'll show you that. Goal number four adding stormwater capacity and we'll talk more about that Victory Park is a great facility But a lot of people are under the impression of serves all downtown It does not and it's only a first-come first-served basis So if you want to grow in the kind of the healthy ways that you're talking about that is kind of an invisible impediment that needs to be addressed and we have a proposal for that and and uh goal number five coordinate the waterfront experience um i mean coordinating what actually happens on the lake is beyond the scope of this study but that directly impacts the waterfront and downtown so it's worth thinking about those things in conjunction and we have a few thoughts that i know many of you are working on ambitiously um all right so these graphics i'm not going to dwell on because these are being edited and sort of fleshed out but those are just the five goals articulated more fully okay so the master plan okay first we start with the existing conditions which we've already shown you and then this is what we're calling the proposed downtown master plan so you can sort of flip back and forth between those and see the the brown are proposed structures and red is civic and the lighter color are sort of existing So for the most part we're talking where these are and then we'll get into specific area plans where we sort of show what these proposals are in detail. And for the most part we're talking about sort of underdeveloped or sort of empty land or land that we're aware of like somebody wants to develop or redevelop. There's kind of a zoom in so you can see it a little bit more clearly and I'll describe what all these are And there's the master plan just kind of simply showing uses for your reference red being commercial yellow and orange being different grades of residential and purple being civic and No, it would. These are just ground floor uses. So everything we propose is mixed use. So it gets tricky to, that's a good question, because it gets tricky to identify, is that building really just commercial? No, it's usually ground floor commercial.

The ones that are red.

But not all are commercial. All right, so in terms of the vision, some of the initiatives are broad initiatives that apply to the whole CRA, and some of them are specific area plans. First, we'll talk about the broad initiatives. Okay, so the goal of connecting the string of pearls is really about a greenways network, and I'm sorry I didn't get the image that had the . If you can see, there are greenways, whoops. If you read the key, it's probably easier to see up close, which you'll get to see when you get a copy. But there are greenways like this that create a network. And the idea is to sort of create literally a network of ways that people can get comfortably either walking, biking, golf carts, alternative means of transportation where shade and shelter are emphasized. And the purpose of this is to help people meet their daily needs without getting in a car. Now, you're not going to meet your daily needs by walking for every need, but what if you could meet 50% of your needs by walking? Well, part of that is having good access. Now, one of the great strengths of your downtown is this grid, and we selected streets that made sense. So if you look at the original plat, West Avenue, Lake Avenue, and Mineola were all 100-foot right-of-ways. So those are just great opportunities for additional bike paths. And then the greenways are all sort of a green dashed line. And the Chain of Pearls has these little circles. And this is a proposal around Center Lake. up and over by Crystal Lake and actually continuing on. And there's a team of people sort of investigating what that might be and where it goes. One thing I sort of want to emphasize is that you already have the South Lake Trail and other county trails, which are a fantastic system of what I would call kind of like recreational bike trails, good for long distance exercise. And some people certainly use them for commuting and sort of other uses. The Greenways Network is a complement to that, and it's more smaller scale, the more fine grain. And it's not – the Chain of Pearls bike trail can be a destination for families, but it's also part of a network that connects schools to homes to business centers to all those places. So that's an important sort of broad initiative is the Greenways Network that supports this connecting the string of pearls. Oh, and this is, I think you've already seen, Marina showed this to you, and this is the Greenways Network at the scale of the city. So we were looking, whoops. We were looking specifically at this little area in the northwest, in the downtown area, but we're proposing a network throughout the entire city. It's easier to propose downtown because you have this wonderful grid. There's a lot of discontinuity and lack of connections in the rest of the city, so it's harder to pick those out. And over time, you might have strategic conversations with places like King's Ridge. Are you willing to have not a place for cars to zoom through, but are you willing to let maybe some bicyclists and some pedestrians pass through to sort of increase the Greenways network?

Maybe another neighborhood.

We'll have to ask the president of each one.

Yeah, sure. We'll work on it.

All right. And then another goal was adding stormwater capacity. So this diagram really shows you the existing catchment sheds. So you'll recognize this is Victory Point. And it was taking advantage of the natural topography that drained into West Lake. And it has a connection out to Lake Mineola, which is a Florida protected water, Florida outstanding water. So very high levels of cleanliness are required. And so they really did an amazing job transforming West Lake into Victory Point. And it provides storm water capacity. I think I'm holding these buttons down too long. Okay. for that area. But if you look at that boundary a little closer, that goes right down the middle of Montrose. The whole south side of Montrose is not in the Victory Point catchment basin, nor is the Dohoyos property. But you can see that there are other existing, there are other just natural catchment, catchment basins. None of these others have been sort of studied and engineered in the way that Victory Point was, but they could be. They could be, and if you want to grow, you may need to consider that. So this next diagram is a proposal specifically for Center Lake. So here you see Victory Point. And what does Victory Point consist of? Well, you've got the pond where larger things settle out, you've got the inundation marsh, and then what they call a filter marsh, and then this is the outlet to Lake Mineola. So you're obligated to do all that, and rightly so, to clean the water. What about the idea of reconfiguring Center Lake, keeping a big open body of water here for the same stages, like an open pond, and then having your inundation marsh, your filter marsh, and you already have a six-inch pipe that heads out west somewhere, and you have to bring in a truck to pump it. Why not put in a permanent larger pipe and a permanent pump station The truth is that you don't need it that often. Speaking to Jim Mayweather in public services, water is only flowing out here very rarely. And so I think you have something like 100 pumps already for sanitary. Why not one to enable this to be sort of a catchment basin? And then you could treat Center Lake a lot of the way that you do Victory Point. bank that you could disperse on whatever basis you want, first come, first serve, or other. You ask for community benefits to enable the kind of development that you want to see. Otherwise, it's going to be quite hard because the standard rule is that you handle stormwater on site. And with the kind of rules you have around here, which are understandable, it's a bit hard to do. It might also be really good for Center Lake, because as lovely as Center Lake is, the water quality is not so great. and it's had some challenges, it could use some work, and maybe it gets a little bit more of a natural treatment. It's such an important entry feature that I think it's important that it remain more than, it'll be a stormwater facility, but it can be a beautiful one that's an entry to the city. So you've seen this kind of sketched in sort of more naturalistic form, rather than like, Victory Point is very jagged with these highly visible concrete walls. Mayor, you want to say something?

Well, I don't know if you're looking at it. Maybe it'd be, I'm going to just throw this idea at you. Look at Center Lake a little bit more because one of the problems we used to have with Center Lake was flooding all the time. Yes. Okay. And that's why we somewhat did what we did, not do a catch basin. Yes.

You know, in terms of the flooding, people told us about the flood, and we walked around with people from the church, and they showed us how far it came up to the center line of 8th Street, and we had several thoughts about that. Well, one is, I think in response to that, the city already installed that six-inch pipe, and that could become a larger pipe, so flooding events might be less in the future. But one solution is you can see these red hatched areas. Those are elevation 98. If you just took those two, that stretch of 8th Street and that stretch of West Avenue and raised it two feet, you probably overcome most of your flooding issues in terms of circulation on public streets. The third thing I'd say is that you have a street grid, which is highly resilient. So unlike modern cul-de-sac subdivisions, you can actually drive around it. So if for a week or two these streets are flooded, it's not really the end of the world. especially given the local topography. Floods are really damaging when structures like interior space are damaged. I mean, ripping out drywall and things like that is a nightmare. The buildings are all out of the flood range. So you're really just talking about the inconvenience of a street that's blocked. But maybe a part of this whole sort of kind of re-engineering and beautification of Center Lake is to adjust the flooding, whether it's through pumping, raising the street elevations, but I think a big lesson to take away from Victory Point is the pedestrian access and having the nice paths that go around all the sides. I mean, this should be really thought about, not just as a stormwater facility, it is that, but as a park, and an important park.

And just to emphasize one thing, I don't think you said it correctly or wrong, but St. John's, who controls all this, they will tell you Center Lake is at capacity right now. So you can't add to it. So adding the two feet to the street sounds like a lot, but when you start thinking about what the cost of Victory Point was, the cost of adding two feet is negligible.

Yeah, you could increase the capacity of it in a number of ways. The interesting thing in Claremont is that the issue with stormwater is not so much storing excess capacity as it is filtration and cleaning. Cleaning, right. If you look at the 100-year flood maps in Claremont, it's pretty negligible, although it's striking that Centerlink seems to be the one place downtown that I'm aware of. There may be others, some flooding issues, but they're relatively minor in the scheme of things. I mean, that's spoken from someone who does work down in Miami.

Well, it used to flood on a regular basis during the rainy season before we did all this work. Okay. So it used to be much more regular. Oh yeah, it used to flood a lot before we put in all the drainage and everything about it.

Were there any other lakes there?

No, the only other area I worry about flooding, I've seen a lot of flooding, is Emerald Lake over here. Right outside of Clemont, the one outside of Groland, and Mobile Home Park over there now. That still has a lot of flooding problems. and they'll go to the two main areas.

One thing I've heard from residents who've been in Claremont a long time is that Center Lake used to be a bit more, feel like kind of the center of the community. There used to be sort of vents on the shoreline and some of those were sort of diminished after I think all the swales were installed. So I think it'd be good to really sort of, I mean, the engineers need to do their thing and do a really good job, but it needs to be under the direction of someone looking after the design of it as a public space and as a public park. So all the engineering needs to be done in the service of those goals. This diagram on the left is really about connecting – I spoke a little bit earlier about the challenges of connecting Montrose down to the lakefront. So Montrose has these great frontages, and I thought it's really – your lakefront should have great frontages. especially those two blocks there, are such great opportunities for restaurants and other places that really take advantage of amazing views looking out there. But how do you connect down? And we have a number of strategies to do that. But one of them is making the end of each street an attractive destination that sort of draws you there. One thing you've built in is just the views. So we're all for planting trees, but maintain a view corridor at the end of each street. So the streets should be lined with trees, but make sure that you don't have trees blocking the view of the water. And then at the end of each street could have a sort of distinct character. Like for example, we have a proposal for like a waterfront over here in West Avenue, you know, this is really more of a catalog of techniques. So there's the idea of a plaza, there's the idea of a pier, possibly even a building. Historically, there used to be some buildings. There could be a chapel or a meeting hall or something.

A long time ago, you used to actually have buildings, like I think one old police station used to actually sit out over the water.

I've seen amazing photos. They're incredible. So, I mean, why not revive one of those? And then the cardio challenge is a great way to terminate West Avenue. So each street has kind of an identity as it approaches the water. And then this diagram over on the right is really about planning what happens on the lake, which, as I said earlier, is beyond the scope of this study. But we provide this just to sort of stimulate conversations. It's based on conversations I've had with residents. And one of the conversations was the possibility of relocating the rowing course, which we're given to understand is somewhere over here. It used to end right at the end of 8th Street Pier, so you could stand at the 8th Street Pier and watch the end of the races, which I thought was pretty cool. I rode a bit myself, and I thought that was a pretty cool sort of public celebration of that moment. But we understand that the waters have been choppy and windy over here, and maybe a rolling course would be better somewhere over on the west side. Maybe, in fact, maybe a little bit better over here. And the idea of a boathouse, potentially even in Lake Hiawatha. And the existing boathouse sounds like it would have plenty of use with other sort of water sports. You've already taken the great move of moving motorized boats over to the east side. So whether sailing boats or kayaks or other things could use the existing structure. And then a new rowing club potentially up here would have great views of the race course. But it's a complicated thing. It needs to be sort of coordinated with all kinds of other users that we just don't know about. We've heard about wakeboarders and jet skiers and others. But it does have a direct impact on how your shoreline gets used. So it's worth thinking through.

Let me add just a little to it because you talked about it more at length. I think it's really cool. You were talking about if I want to go fish. Where would I want to go fish? That's a user. If I want to go take a picture of a sunset, like that's what you'll see a lot of times right now just on the trail is people coming out, they drive down, they park, and then they get out and take pictures. They want to see a natural sunset behind them. And where do you do that? And so just coordinating between all those different users of the lake as opposed to always just looking at it as a single thing is what you said before. I think that's a great idea.

Yeah, it's just an amazingly expansive lakefront. And it deserves comprehensive planning and coordination. And not everything has to be in sort of one location. This is probably the wrong location, but in this context, we mentioned the the cardio challenge. At the end of, I don't know if everyone is aware of that, but it's a great proposal. At the end of West Avenue, the right-of-way gets very steep. And it goes down to the lakefront. And this is sort of an artist's interpretation of what it would be. So there's kind of like a stairway up and a stairway down. And you kind of challenge yourself or there's an app and you compare your results to others. But it could be a sort of great public space perhaps with some sort of public outlook of a look at the top. All right, so now we've looked at broad area initiatives. Now we're going to focus on some specific area plans. And this sort of calls out what these are. I know it's hard to read from where you are, but these are the six parking garage study sites. These are, I think, potential development sites. I can't even read it from here. These are like parks and public spaces. of proposals by others. So we'll just walk through some of them. The first one we'll look at is what we're calling the West Avenue Waterfront Plaza. And just to back up, right at the end of West Avenue on this prime waterfront location, you have a brand new surface parking lot. And we've heard a lot of people say that maybe there's a better use for that spot. So this is a proposal. This is an idea. And by the way, These are all very specific. It's up to you what you do. We're trying to sort of paint a vision and give you an idea of what sort of Claremont could be. But each and every project needs to be sort of negotiated and figured out, financial design at all different levels. But we're trying to paint a picture. So maybe Waterfront Plaza is kind of where the city meets the lake. And there's like a shared use plaza here with maybe a hotel and shops and restaurants here. And it really opens up a great view to the water. And maybe there's been talk about how nice it would be to be able to bring a a boat or pontoon boat or other downtown and have a meal. Maybe this is a great location to have sort of a marina. And you'll notice that we've kind of split it so we keep a view open to the water and create like a little mini boat base. And this is not like a overnight marina. There's no gas station or repairs. This is just for people for like kind of day trips, temporary boat parking basically. And it's completely optional to the scheme. If people don't like that idea, you could And basically, you've got the plaza and what we're calling like a promenade. And I'm sorry that the image is so small, but you can study when you get the copies. But the bike trail sort of winds its way through here. parking is proposed on this sort of empty lot here and realize that this is private land and this is certainly no kind of requirement but it's a suggestion for a parking structure that's lined and we think almost any parking structure that's constructed should be lined with habitable use so you don't have parking which is such a killer to frontages and it could be accessed in the middle of the block directly out over to the hotel so actually you just go right out this way and connect through. And the other proposal, which may be hard to see in this proposal, is that we're actually proposing to continue, what is this little street?

Well, no, but you start with Osceola where everybody knows.

Yeah, so Osceola continues and connects here to this dead-end street. Because my experience is always when I come to that corner of Osceola West, there's like this turn and you feel like, Well, that's kind of the end of everything. I don't know what's beyond there. A street, if handled properly, we're not talking about like a high speed, high volume street, but a very pedestrian friendly street, to connect this dead end over to Osceola, I think would really activate that corner and make it sort of more accessible. And then you'll notice here, behind this mixed-use building, this is maybe a three or four story mixed-use building. There's service off the road. And then these little structures could be pop-up retail. Like a good example is like at Carlton Landing. Little small individual structures that could be for kayak rentals or anything. Kind of all over on the edge of Victory Point Park. This is that structure that's like a stage and a storage. building there. What else can I point out? This is all about sort of like West Avenue and its termination. This you'll recognize is the current location of the post office. And what we're proposing is maybe keep the post office there, but redevelop it with parking, but lined parking. So you have a parking structure that's sort of hidden from the street. And out on the corner could be a nice civic building. That's your new post office. So the post office just literally moves to the corner and has a more civic presence. Right now, the post office really doesn't do anything as a civic building. It just kind of disappears. But you can really sculpt the corner of that building and make it really a nice post office. Or not. It could just be retail or commercial or restaurants, what have you. And then you'll notice, well, I'll talk about it more when we get to 8th Street.

Can you just clarify, go back one, just clarify quickly where the cars can go and can't go?

Well, the cars can go through this plaza, but what it is, it's called, it's like a shared use space. It's a Woonerf. What did you say? It's called a Woonerf. It's a Dutch term.

W-O-O-N-E-R-F.

So when you separate out with like painted lines, which of course is the typical condition, places for cars, cars go as fast as they can, and pedestrians stay on the sidewalk. And that's the way it is in most places, and that's fine. But you can create these zones, these special zones. You don't want to do it everywhere, but where it's a shared new space. And if you pave it, it's amazing how cars slow down and accommodate pedestrians. and becomes like a shared use space so that's what we're proposing here in this west avenue so the hotel drop-offs um and local traffic would circulate that that's clearly not like i mean you wouldn't want to do a winner from route 50 or 27 or something like that but this is out at a corner where there's there's uh it's close to the waterfront and this seems like a prime location for that and the trees are planted along the sides to preserve the open views of the water I regret not having a larger image of this. All right. It's helpful, I realize, to kind of show this for context. So what we were looking at was this on West Avenue. Next, we're going to look at proposals for the art walk. There's currently an existing art walk, as you know, between Montrose and Mineola. But there's talk about expanding it and connecting all the way down to the water, which is a great idea.

Hey, good to see you. That's new in your world. You only knew. Hey, I feel friends with you.

So here in the art walk, this is the existing art walk, and it continues straight down. We're posing a little court, a little pedestrian plaza. There was talk about this in the Shred. How nice would it be to have a place just in close proximity to Montrose for where kids could play. And then it continues across the street with a building that receives you into sort of a four-court, a three-sided court. And then it becomes sort of a pedestrian passage that winds its way down. And I need to include precedent. I don't know if anyone's been to, there's a great building precedent in Winter Park called Grenada Court. I don't know if people are familiar with that. It's amazing. It blows my mind. It's so simple. I'm amazed that it just isn't done everywhere. You take a standard 50-foot commercial lot on a main street, and put a little 12 foot passage down the middle with 19 foot buildings on each side. It's the most intimate, charming place and lots of retail frontage and then you have little sort of courtyards along the way. So that's the kind of the scale of what we're talking about here. So you wind your way down. And we did not keep it straight on the philosophy that Claremont has this amazing grid with all these straight streets that terminate the view. You have no shortage of straight streets with views to the water. Why not have a place that winds around a little bit? And we've carefully worked around this sort of holdout property. The old house. And then along 7th, we're actually proposing townhouses, which seems like a perfect transition building type because it can kind of sustain the urban edge of downtown, but you provide a residential front to this neighborhood, which actually has a lot of nice old crafts and bungalows. It has the Todd House. They're very protective of that little neighborhood, and why not sort of do them a favor and present something? Plus, as a building type, a townhouse steps down that steep topography perfectly. I think how well San Francisco is handled with townhouses because they're narrowed. So there's an alley back through here. And then completing the art walk with the east walk passage that cuts horizontally there. And actually, you'll see in other drawings, we've heard about proposals to continue the art walk into this block. So we've drawn that in. I hope we're not freaking anyone out with this.

Only in the audience.

All right, here's another option for the art. Wait, what happened? Oh, you know, I was talking through a diagram. This is the proposal for the art walk here. It's the same project there. And then here's option two. So instead of the art walk kind of going to the left of the holdout property, it cuts a diagonal, kind of like Rosemary Beach over to the east side, towards the northeast side, towards a little plaza facing the water here. And in some of the scenarios, we even have that sort of building terminating the end of 7th Street. And so you get great views out in that direction. Okay, and there's an artist's interpretation of what a view might look like from the art walk in this little plaza, looking down there.

Where am I standing?

You are standing right. Well, imagine you're standing in this courtyard. It's kind of a compiled view. But you're looking down this. You're looking standing right here. And you're looking down this diagonal and out to the water. It's more like you're standing in the square in option one. You said it was all about the plaza for the kids. Yeah, the plaza for the kids, but you're looking down the diagonal of option two.

So they combine.

Yeah, kind of combine.

They call that artistic license. Artistic license.

Okay, and then this... Let's see. So then, OK, 8th Street infill. So we talked a lot about connecting Montrose to the water. And here's the existing conditions where you see you have empty parking lots, sides of buildings, people some people do walk down there but not as many as you like and so this is a proposal just to sort of how can you sort of infill it along the way and they're never like here is Patrick Bianchi's scheme which is excellent for infilling that parking lot that will do a huge amount of work right there and there's also talking about putting a hotel above existing storefronts at that northwest corner of 8th and Montrose We're not in love with the trailhead there. It seems like the little pocket park over here might be a better park, and maybe that gets redeveloped. And actually, I think it'll do more benefit in terms of drawing pedestrians along 8th Street than kind of a wall. And then here's a proposal for this property down here at 8th and Oxiola, how you can sort of keep that building but line it with sort of a commercial mixed use. And then if you look more, it's hard to see from where you are, but there are lots of opportunities throughout downtown of an old strategy of like so you have a house in an area that became more urban you can just build a little storefront out along the front i'm sure you've seen this everywhere just a little one-story commercial thing that brings it out to the street provides a nice frontage provides added value and it sort of helps draw people along the street but you need a destination so down here um is maybe the Veterans Memorial. It's sort of a plaza. And maybe this fishing pier here. And maybe Salt Sack lines, it's sort of an outdoor eating area with more of a kind of a pergola. And it sort of frames that sort of space there. So just ways to sort of kind of bring people along the path and then create a destination that people, that draws people into the waterfront. And then here's that proposal at the corner of Mineola and Nate. The City Hall parking garage, which this decision is ultimately up to you guys whether you want to build a garage at all or which of the two sites that are currently being considered, 7th and Mineola or City Hall. We admit to favoring the City Hall site and we can tell you why. But there are a lot of considerations for that. But here is the City Hall parking garage. And as with all of our parking garage studies, we lined it so that what you see from the street is habitable space. We like this site for many reasons, one of which is that it's large enough to build liners easily, and they don't have to be integrated into the structure, which is very doable, but it's just simpler to have these simple units lining the parking garage. We also liked it because it didn't use highly valuable, developable land at the core of the downtown. And it sort of intercepts people coming off of 50 before they cross Montrose. Because Montrose gets blocked off for food trucks and farmer's markets. So why not get out of your car before you drive through the farmer's market?

You said these simple liners?

Well, they could be. Or they could be rental apartments or anything. But in other words, this liner can sit on its own land. as opposed to underneath the parking garage. If you build it up here at 7th and Mignola, the liners are on the lowest level and require speed ramps. It can be rental, it can be anything. But it also affords an opportunity to really define, you have a nice little park here, but it feels too amorphous, it needs more definition. And if you have a liner here facing it, it actually transforms that little green into a really nice space. And then one opportunity, I think, you know, and again, I know I'm sure we're being kind of controversial and upsetting people, but that alley needs to continue through. I see trucks all the time parked on Montrose and on 8th because they can't turn around. And it's a very short distance. If you just poke that alley through, then trucks could pull through and then you wouldn't have deliveries on Montrose.

It's already a street, isn't it?

What's that?

It's already a street or there's a building?

It goes all the way to the end and then it's just a piece of grass.

Remember, that's not a street. That used to be, actually, a building used to sit in there. Yeah. And, of course, you had the other one that was an alleyway from that. Yeah. Well, alleys function best when you can pull all the way through. Well, you can pull in and go ahead and make a street all the way through to the alley.

Put that in the report.

Yeah, okay.

All right. So then what you've kind of dubbed the Keeler Park neighborhood, this neighborhood along Mineola with these nice historic homes, a couple of moves to help sort of strengthen its sort of integrity of its kind of urban fabric. One we already mentioned was the townhouses along 7th, but then also lining the the city center parking. Right now there's an ugly surface parking that comes right out into the right of way, but you could use a Hannibal Square style liner building and mask the parking and improve the street front because it's a lovely street. And then here is the cardio challenge. And then we did calculations for each of these about number of residential units, square footage of commercial, and amount of parking. Now this is really sort of a look at the waterfront here. And we've already discussed some of these, like the possibility of a waterfront plaza at the end of West Avenue, the 8th Street Pier. Possibly this is the moment where you celebrate the middle of the Florida coast-to-coast bikeway. Here's the cardio challenge. And then in the back, there's an interesting suggestion about some sort of way of honoring and celebrating the kind of history of the triathlon over here on the edge of the triathlon area. And then 5th Street already has its own sort of pier down here, a smaller pier. It doesn't get beyond the grass. The nice thing about the 8th Street pier is it got you out so far. And then another thing is thinking about sort of pedestrians along the waterfront. You have this great promenade already in the existing park here between 7th and 8th. We're proposing kind of a promenade over here at the West Avenue Plaza. And if Salt Shack is willing to entertain the possibility of a little boardwalk connection, if they're building a dining terrace out there, there are lots of good examples of this, but that would be sort of and certainly increase their visibility, increase walkability. Yes?

In the bath, there was a suggestion that we repurpose the storm water in between lake and That 7th?

Yeah. Okay.

What are your thoughts on that?

Well, we're all in favor of having more sort of retail and restaurants facing the waterfront. It seems like the natural, obvious place to start is downtown. Like these blocks between 7th and West, you know, why give up parkland when you have private land and frontage that needs to be developed and is closer to Montrose? It seems like the place to start. But there is also the opportunity long-term to activate The these frontages and maybe instead of giving away the public parkland just put not a full street, but like a basic pedestrian access not not a narrow sidewalk but a promenade. that creates a frontage along these lots. So that over time, these lots facing the park could redevelop into restaurants or commercial or great places to live. And they would have sort of a front. Because right now, they're all turning their backs on it. But the potential there is huge. So after this area is filled in, then maybe it continues out along there, along sort of a pedestrian access promenade. The other thing that that does is it helps separate pedestrian traffic from bicycle traffic, which we're not super strict about that. But I notice that there are a lot of people walking along. I mean, I had a bicyclist yell at me because I was taking photos along the South Lake Trail. But in this stretch especially, here's the bike trail coming through. If you had sort of a promenade, really from here along here for pedestrians, they cross here, they have a crossing, and they continue through the park, over the boardwalk, and over to the, I mean, you'd have just a spectacular pedestrian realm throughout your sort of downtown area. You really would because All right, I guess we're going to talk about the church sites.

No. I mean, the only reason I say no is you haven't even given a presentation to the church about what you've done, and I don't know. I don't think it would be appropriate to talk about it.

Well, I think the church has its own ideas over there on the scene as well.

No. There's some exciting opportunities there, too. Okay, and this was a property, we don't have to dwell a lot on this, but this is what we're calling the gateway property. It's at 12th and 50 as you kind of enter from the west, a large parcel, and trying to think of something that'll kind of support your vision more than a convenience store or a car wash or something like that. You still might incorporate those uses, but maybe in a more walkable format. So maybe it's a little bit more commercial out towards 50 and more residential, facing the existing residential neighborhood towards the back. And a good transition type is the townhouse or small apartment buildings. We have a bunch of options. Which one? The main court. Oh yeah, so like townhomes are turned sideways and they face a little pedestrian court here that comes off of, what is that, Osceola?

DeSoto.

DeSoto, DeSoto. And then they're served by alleys and back. Here in this scheme, the alley runs sort of east-west, which has the benefit of not presenting fronts to 11th Street, which really feels more like an alley. It's only a 40-foot right-of-way, and it has a parking lot in the back. And then the, what is this street here? Juniata. Juniata continues through, and there's a little plaza in the middle, and then you come out on this side. In this scheme, maybe this is a small grocery store, like Trader Joe's, something like that. You know, kind of facing.

Better than a Firestone. Better than a Firestone. Better than a Firestone. And here's a little attached closet. Trader Joe's.

And this might be a nice way to handle 11th Street. Since 11th Street is really, there's nothing to it, just handle it almost like an alley and make the fronts here face the circle pedestrian way here, apartment buildings there. All of these have setbacks because there's currently a required 50-foot setback on Route 50 anyway. And as part of the form-based code, we're proposing that that be sort of handled as what's called a contra-directional parking lane. which is a way of handling parking in a more elegant way in front of the buildings and making use of that space. All right, so the lumberyard has already, half of it's been constructed, all this stuff down here, these four buildings. But what's called the commercial plot parcel, the owner is thinking of selling it off. And these are, here you can see what's already proposed. So it's already proposing some kind of a retail entertainment unit. And this is just sort of rearranging kind of the kit of parts a little bit so you have more sort of walkability, more green spaces, and providing better frontages towards the lake and towards streets rather than putting a big parking lot facing the lake. And then that sort of variation on that alternative. All right. So and then another area of proposals was along Route 50. So as we mentioned, FDOT has a bunch of proposals over the years. As long as they're doing a resurfacing, there's an opportunity for Claremont to make requests, see if money may or may not eventually be available from MPO, or whether Claremont feels like some of these are worth it to invest in themselves. But what we did is we looked at it. You'll see that we've layered in the Greenways network. And a big challenge is crossing 50. So wherever you have agreed, like along West Avenue, we're proposing a new pedestrian crossing that will help assist with pedestrians, bicyclists, even golf carts. Where you have a traffic circle, what we've proposed is – sorry, where you currently have a traffic light, we're proposing traffic circles, which are very efficient at – handling uh you know traffic um and at certain times of the day more efficient and and our our traffic engineer believes this would be appropriate location you're saying traffic circle like a roundabout yeah like around here yes that's what everybody said except at that so don't worry okay so um you know what a roundabout is right

Yeah, I've seen them in cities and it works. Yeah, in some of the cities, yeah. Major traffic cities.

Well, that's the state of New Jersey because they're removing all of them.

Was that the Rotary's?

I'm not going to fly on Route 50. No, it's not. Anyways, keep on going.

Don't get hung up. There are a lot of other proposals. One of the most important is the median in the middle of Route 50.

I'd rather drive through a roundabout than wait at a stoplight. An important opportunity is to transform the turning lane

in the middle of Route 50 into a median, which will actually – Which you can do with a roundabout, right? Yeah, which is totally congruent with a roundabout. Plant trees, improve sidewalks. These are all improving. In fact, FDOT provided a great – they actually suggested this in 2020. So they're definitely open to it. So even if you don't get a roundabout like this, we've actually had proposals for how can you just improve the intersections? And one of them is to make the crosswalks more perpendicular to the direction of travel, so that pedestrian crossings are shorter, and provide pedestrian refuges in the middle on these medians. There are a lot of strategies like that. Here, where 8th Street meets 50, you could use brick paving. It's actually stamped asphalt to sort of make a contrasting color, which improves safety and improves the visibility. And then finally, I'm going to share with you the parking studies. These were the six sites that were considered at one time. I know that the PIGSAC Committee is really only considering two. We just want you to see this as a way of thinking about how to handle parking if you feel the need to build parking. And so for example, the City Hall site, which I already showed you, sort of lined with residential on these streets and maybe a mixed-use commercial building facing the park. here at the church, a parking deck with lined units around. And here's the lining units at the city center and the post office. And this is one of the sites the PIGSAC is considering. If you want to put a parking deck at 7th and Mideola, we would recommend that you have a speed ramp up the first level since you can have tall retail lining the streets at the ground level and then a narrow band of residential liners or depper stories and we were told at that time to extend it over the old art walk we definitely don't recommend that and i think that's out of consideration now so i think that was a good move um and then we've already shown you uh schemes for the joyous property uh cramming a lot of parking into the hollis would be a shame

So 150 pages Wow, thank you You talked about the need to address the comprehensive use on

And we had ABA, NRPA in here. In your experience, what would you say is the next step for us to address uses on the lake so that we can really nail down a plan for the waterfront?

Yeah, it just seems like someone's got to take the bull by the horns and sort of, you know, kind of reconcile all these different sort of uses. And maybe, you know, have your own sort of Lake Mignola charrette and bring all the people around a table. and sort of try to understand all of the different competing uses and proposals, but make sure you have someone who draws there. Don't let it just be a talking session. The magic of a charrette is drawing. paper you can just talk endlessly but ideas quickly sort of sort themselves out when they when they start to get drawn so so what do we put the rowing course here oh well that doesn't work because you need to go through this bridge or what do we have like diners visit downtown here at this location oh that's too close to kayaks and stuff like that or you know what's the best part of the lake for this I mean it requires a comprehensive planning effort But what I've heard here specifically is, you know, okay, if you're going to have people visiting to dine in downtown, where do you want to handle that sort of boat parking? Where do you want the rowing course to be? Where do you want the sailors to be? Where do you want kayak rentals to be? Those are all important questions. You've got so much waterfront. It really deserves planning. And the thing is, you've got at least a mile there, if not more. And you don't have to put everything on one location. There might be better locations for this, that, and the other.

Are you aware of any other city that has two miles of linear?

Chicago is amazing.

It's just one mile, right?

I don't know. The lakefront? What, Michigan?

There's probably a lot of lakefront. The Miracle Mile, right? Is that what it's called?

But the Miracle Mile is not on the lake. It's not on the lake.

Oh, it's not on the lake.

I thought that's what it was called. The lakefront is very expansive.

Okay.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, Michigan somewhere.

Anything Wisconsin? They've got tons of lakes. Oh, yeah. Multiple miles of lakefront? Like, connected to a downtown?

Yeah. Not the one. Sheboygan? Sheboygan's right on the commission. Manitowoc? Milwaukee? They're all right on the commission.

Tavares has more than Mount Dora. The point is you're saying it's unique. It's unique. Yeah, it's a real opportunity. No, it is.

It is. It's integrated. Yeah, because if we go to Mount Dora, Tavares, there's nothing. I mean, it would be awesome.

See, like, say along here, along this zone right there, all that prime land, I mean, It may be underdeveloped now, but it's valuable. It will get redeveloped eventually. You as a city have the opportunity, because you have control over the public land, to actually create a nice frontage and turn it into something more. Otherwise, it's just going to be developed like... I mean, so often, waterfront gets developed in very sort of unfriendly ways. Really? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the default. It kind of pulls World War II development. It's just that, you know... A lot of times it's privatized or people sort of turn backs or put it in appropriate uses. So, I mean, the city has an opportunity to sort of guide it. I mean, you can't control ultimately what people exactly do on their private land, but I think you can provide a vision and then people get excited about it and jump on the bandwagon.

I mean, he's from Miami. Miami? We have the water.

It's just a little part. This is not Miami.

No, we're talking about, it's not about Miami. We're talking about uniqueness. And there's really nothing. You were asking what city. None of the big cities have what we could have.

I got a question.

It's not New York either.

I love all of this. I live across the street. I'd love to see it. It's called the Greenway. After the 630. to the extent, I mean one of the most beautiful Italy lakes. I have some ideas. I'm just curious. When you look at this palette, is it because we weren't real development friendly? Or was it just a matter of time? This isn't the most affluent part. Other parts of Winter Garden and West Orange, there's just, we've got to What are your thoughts?

Do you see this? Well, I mean, I think there are a lot of reasons, and I don't really know the history deeply, but just one of the reactions I had is that some of it is supply and demand. There's so much waterfront, and so efforts get so sort of dispersed. And I think as the population increases, I mean, there's only a fixed amount of waterfront, so the value is going up over time, and so I think it'll be more and more valuable. But yeah. It's just timing. Well, it sort of misguided development impulses following World War II. I mean, Claremont is wonderful because it was lucky enough to get laid out in the 1880s and had a great grid and amazing topography and really established a nice basis up through World War II. And then after World War II, people weren't interested in straight streets and walking

Let me add, the other big thing that happened was when it developed around the lakes. Remember, this was a very relatively rural place. People weren't coming here to build a town in 1970, let's say. And so you had everybody grabbing their fruits of nature, but on the lakes. And so as soon as he said that, he used the word prototype. And what he meant was they sold the land all the way, and many times, into the water. which cut off use from it. So once they did all the property lines and sold all the individual lots, you couldn't build a town. You couldn't build a walkway. You couldn't build anything around there. And so that was just a function of when it developed, those people weren't thinking, oh, why don't we build this great city that everybody will love to come to?

That's what Mineola has.

It's a tiny thing.

That's why Mineola doesn't have a waterfront. Unlike Mineola.

Nathan, you're exactly right on that because what people don't realize and what one of the biggest driving factors was that East Avenue where it turns off and the boat ramp is at. Actually, you used to be able to continue right around. There used to be a lake road that ran all along the lakefront. It ran all along the lakefront years ago when growing up here, when you're coming out of Minneapolis, instead of going up East Avenue, you could go up East Avenue, but the road had continued all the way around lakefront, and it dumped out, it ended over here on 8th Street, but you had access to 5th, 7th, all the other streets had connection.

The old train route, right?

And the train track ran through there as well. Oh, okay.

You can see the old...

Yeah, all that ran through there. But so when, going back to what Nathan was saying, when they sold off that and closed off that road and started selling it, trying to sell off their property for redevelopment, basically that destroyed a lot of, well, that's what killed the downtown because nobody knew it existed anymore because you never had any traffic. You'd come around East Avenue, you'd come back to Highway 50, you knew that downtown didn't even know it existed anymore. So that's why it was a ghost town back here in the early... in 2010, 2012, it was like a ghost town, and that's why we made so much effort to try to bring it back. But along with that, when they started dividing the land, people grabbed hold of everything, and they didn't want to develop it. You know, they want to hold on to the only piece of the pie, okay? So it all goes back there, and I always envisioned the fact that if they had kept that road there, all that probably would have been developed along there now, okay? You know, but it didn't happen.

I have three points and one question. One is I'm concerned about the amount of use of activation and not the words preservation or restoration. I don't think I heard the word preservation or restoration used at all in that presentation. And when we're talking about our historic downtown, that concerns me, that those words aren't being used at all. I think if I owned some of these properties, I would have some concerns about seeing my space being planned by a city for something other than what I made. So I guess my question is, is this a plan or is this a series of proposals?

It's just proposals.

And that may be rhetorical, but it's being proposed as a plan. And I think a plan has a connotation that this is what we want to do. And a series of proposals are, these are things that could be done. And I feel differently about this one than the comp plan in some respect. I didn't feel that way until this presentation. And I think if I were the general public, I might have some big questions about this, given the depth of it, the gravity of some of what's being proposed here or planned here. But I just have a general question for us as a council, for CRA, for P&Z, and for the general public, because I think we're getting closer to the end points. And I've never really felt like I had an actual concrete, what are our next steps for the comprehensive plan? the downtown action plan, the form-based code, and the VAP for the parks in terms of are they formally being presented to a body or multiple bodies and are they going to be voted on for action to be implemented and put into place? I know we have to do that with the comprehensive plan. That's a state requirement. But if we're not doing it with these other things, I guess why are we here? And if we are gonna do those things, I wanna make sure that we give the bodies who are gonna review it ample time to digest it. And that there's nothing else on the agenda that needs to be covered when we're talking about that, because this is going to be deep. Not deep because it's bad, but just this is big time discussion points that ought to be given the amount of time that they deserve. And so I ask that, I don't know if it goes to the city manager, but for comp plan, those four things, and you don't have to necessarily answer it today, but can we get all of us as members of our different boards and councils, a here's the exact plan for the comp plan, the downtown action plan, form-based code, and the VEP, next steps, the boards it goes to, when it's coming, when we're gonna get the materials, how it's gonna be given to the community, because there's a lot of moving parts here and the last thing I want to have happen, and I said this to Mr. Van Wagner and Mr. Mathis in an agenda review, is for this to show up in a packet on a Thursday and be expected to vote on it on Tuesday. I will tell you right now, I will absolutely filibuster the heck out of that if I have to because that is not the right way to go about doing this. we have to have ample time to digest it review it discuss it publicly and vote on it and i'm worried i'm worried that we're just going to get this right before it comes out because we've seen nothing in writing about a concrete plan moving forward so i'm putting it out publicly in front of council in front of pnz in front of cra in front of staff i really would like to see a plan for these four things moving forward

Look, I'm in agreement with you 100%. I don't care about anybody else. After that, the documents up there, I couldn't even read it off an X-ray. So how am I going to do my research? This is supposed to be a workshop. Honestly, I'm not here to beat anybody up, but I really, really think Mr. Cremo came up with a great idea. It costs money for the documents. Can you give us a suggestion online so we have, we all have cell phones. So we can look at it. I'm trying to understand exactly what you're showing. I think your idea is great. I'm in agreement with Councilman Bain. I mean, it takes a lot. I mean, this is a lot to ask for.

Can we get an answer to Mr. Bain? I think I asked that question at the beginning. I think Mr. North said we would be getting something later on down the line. I don't know. But I agree with him, and that's one of the reasons I asked the question. Will we have something physically in writing to be able to sit down and look at so we have time to study? But Mr. Bain, he's more specific and everything. Yeah, we're going to need a lot more time to digest this and go through all these stuff. Yeah. And that's why I pretty much, when I came in here, sitting here at this presentation, we have nothing to look at. Nothing we could have went through. And like you say, trying to look at that board, that's tough. That's why I asked the question in the beginning. Are we going to get some physical that we can hold on to?

I can try to address both of your questions. As it relates to the comp plan, once again, the idea is at the end of this week, we'll go ahead and put out electronically the draft that is going to be updated based upon what was heard and discussed today. So that's where the comp plan is. And that's essentially the most important because we have to do it. Everything else you don't absolutely positively have to do, but you've got to do that. And that's also going to help inform everything else. You interrupted me quite a bit. The next thing is we can talk about the downtown action plan. This is the first time that he's been able to get feedback from the real community leaders on it. And so this is a very rough, rough draft. So they've got to also produce. and update based upon the things that they've heard. And so even if you have ideas or concepts or whatever that you want to share that you think of tomorrow, you know, that'd be great. If you just email me whatever your comment is, great. I ship it to Ben and his team, and they try to incorporate it in this next rep. So they're going to have to come back out. We're going to have to put it online, right? Okay? Give everybody the chance to provide feedback then. things are gonna drop out, things will be added. One of the good things you just said as an example is, If you look at this, he can see things in 3D. He's got his master's in architecture from Yale. He's got a brain that I don't have. He knows what that looks like. That's different colors. And so what that tells me is, I go back to Ben. I said, Ben, we've got to get some visualizations, the unprecedented photos, perhaps, that are going to help illustrate what you were talking about on this.

It's not that we're above anybody at the citizens vote, but we have a little more head start. Don't forget, I mean, this also has to go to the public.

That's right, that's right. So, and then we talk, you know, so the downtown action plan has to get massaged based upon what we've got. You get that. You'll have the opportunity to have another conversation about it. And so, And it goes through the process. Whatever happens, happens. The next thing, you have a form-based code. Okay, that's essentially updating, at least in the Northwest Quadrant, the idea is updating the zoning code. Well, the zoning code doesn't really work if it's not matching the vision that you adopted for this area. So that's why you have to have the comp plan and the downtown action plan. Because if everybody says, well, we don't want this to happen here or there, They've got the expertise to go ahead and alter that form a scope before you get a big everybody's calling. You said, what are you doing with my property? You know, we had the meeting in Lincoln Park. What do we hear from like a mark? They, you know, getting back to what council member Bain said, they want protection and preservation.

Right.

You know, I learned real quick, redevelopment was the wrong word. When I was thinking about redevelopment, it was like, oh, they're going to upgrade the Winn-Dixie shopping center. He's like, no, they're coming in to mow down my house and they're going to, you know, all that. And that's not what it was. And so that's an example of where you go and you listen to the neighbors that live there, the people who live there. you know, then all of a sudden the consultants go, oh, okay, I see. What we really need to do is how well is the current zoning code protecting them versus what we could come up with in the code. So the bottom line is the code, as much as we'd love to have the code ready to go, we're not ready to go because we don't have the, you know, you don't have the vision ready to go. Now, they've got a draft code, but we've got to make sure that gets changed for that. Okay, and then we have, what was the fourth thing? APAP. The VAP, and I don't know about the VAP off the top of my head.

But that's the order. Sorry.

Go ahead.

Well, so that's the order, but what's the projected timeline?

The projected timeline for the COP plan is to come to Council in October. So we'll have it, hopefully, done by the end of this week, the last draft.

From the council, for what?

Hold up, let him tell you the date. The date here is practical. The 18th is Friday. That would give everybody two and a half weeks before it goes to planning and zoning on the 6th. And the request was for two weeks from Councilman Bing. That gives us two weeks and three more days. And we were wanting to do another workshop for the comp plan only on the 6th also before the planning and zoning meeting. So that way the planning and zoning department would get also another opportunity to hear a presentation. So they'll have two weeks and some change, another meeting before their meeting so they can engage the planning and zoning meeting. I apologize. We got a plane and we just got to talk about it and then another week later the council would meet on the 13th and We have cleared off most of the agenda for everything a cup There's a few intros, but we are pushing back everything we can off of the 13th So there it's three weeks and 34 days something like that So if the plan works well And we can get it out to you on Friday if it makes sense. But if it doesn't, I totally get it. But we were just planning on moving forward with the comp plan first and then going from there. Based on your input, though, we needed to get your input today to even see if that made sense.

So that's why I was told to get my stuff off the 13th.

So on the 13th, what would you be expecting from the council on the 13th?

To hear the comp plan and transmit it to the state. For transmittal. Correct. Just the comp plans. Form-based code has got a lot more work to do. So that's probably going to be later, maybe early next year.

So you're talking about on the 13th, we get it. We have two weeks to look at what we're talking about going to PNZ in the week for the 6th. And then on the 13th, we're doing transmittal. yet still we transmit before we really have anything back from the public input on the comprehensive plan.

There's going to be another workshop and the public will also be here on P&Z and Council. And don't forget, this thing has been workshopped many, many times. There's been more public meetings on this process than I've seen at any comp plan I've ever worked on. There's been a lot of public input.

Can I ask just as a comp plan, does it reference the downtown action plan or form-based code or parks plan?

no no it stands on itself right i was concerned you know referencing things that haven't been brought before us or or uh yeah the only thing that it might say i haven't finished reading at all is that the future code will implement portions of this plan yeah it's not going to have any of the specifics of the code okay so are we giving you what you need for the master plan right now in terms of feedback

I'll pose, just for the sake of it not being a counterpoint, is when I look at the 2015 strategic plan, it's different, but it looks a lot like this. I mean, the visual of how it's laid out, and yes, some people's individual property. I mean, it looks like this, but it's a concept plan, and You know, I think that there's no other way than to show what could be. I don't know how to do it, but to show what could be. And I don't think it's inconsistent with the way that we handle the 2015 presentation. Whether people choose to build or not, that's up to them. But the fact is, the idea would be, I mean, what I'm hearing from this is, We want to have streetscapes that invite people to walk through downtown. What I really like about this that's different from the 2015 plan is I like how kind of the density of downtown is actually much more consolidated than the original 2015 concept. It kind of sprawled a little bit with the downtown from my observation. In 2015, the idea of Victory Point was proposed. Now we're saying, hey, Center Lake is an opportunity. Doesn't mean we have to do anything with it, but it shows us what could be there. And I think that's the value of this proposal. The idea of West, there was an idea of a promenade in 2015. So there's some sort of theory that over time, and in a classical education, you worry about the things that survive over time. And so it's interesting that there are many things that are similar or the same. Updates, obviously, additional planning, you've done one, now here's phase two. I like what I heard as far as direction of focus on building the core, I'm probably using the wrong words, but those two blocks that are waterfront before you worry about, like in the VAP, the suggestion was the downtown, the idea of creating a human path versus a bike path, that was kind of, Cool, so these are concepts that we might choose to implement, or not choose to implement, but I don't know how we do this without saying what could be. And I also don't think this is inconsistent with the CBD, our old, back in 2015, there was a CBD, and I think we don't have it anymore? Where?

Well, you still have a CBD, but that'll change with the form-based code.

Right, so like the density is not much different than the density of what was originally created. you know but the question is how do we get people and maybe it'll happen in time how do we encourage people i like to develop because obviously we have they had the cbd all this time and certain parcels didn't choose to develop i like that there's concepts for where parking could go i think that's really cool you know i could see i could see development and drawings and we've talked about the and development design center, the post office becomes an interesting concept in the civic space that's really important. So to me, this just gives ideas. And I think that's fine. I would suggest to staff that if individual properties have been addressed, that you talk to those people. But it's my understanding that certain of them have been spoken.

Yeah, we've been involved in the process.

Could I suggest a couple of Brian's points? First of all, let me say in terms of preservation, I'm a huge fan of preservation. It almost goes out without saying that there's a lot of preservation going on here. Claremont Main Street is very active and has secured lots of grounds for storefront renovations. And we were very careful, I mean, we were very careful actually to sort of knit these proposals in. If you look carefully at what the Kings were proposing, you see Montrose is untouched. right? That amazing block of Montrose is untouched. Where you see dark colors are like, that's a parking lot. That's the DeHoos property. That's a parking lot. That's a parking lot. That's a parking lot. That's the post office, which was put in play by the city. The city actually said, what could we do with that parcel? The police, the donor of the police station saw what was going on over here at Peter Amber Mount case and said, hey, I'll take some free design services. The church was super eager to meet with us. I think they're going to be very excited. I'm very excited about this scheme. We really listened to what they want. Now the kids, with this proposal, they could get two layers of parking, take advantage of the tow boat. The kids could walk out into a play area that's entered from the sidewalk that could be sort of a... Where else can you put a parking structure that actually has a usable exterior space accessible from the sidewalk? There's no other site where you could do that.

Well, I think the point is you're talking to the people better.

Yeah, so we've been in communication with a lot of people. It doesn't mean everyone's going to like it, but the other thing I would say this is just in terms of our approach to planning, we're new urbanists. And our approach does tend to be sort of specific. And I think to make good places, you need to be specific. So much post-war planning is just kind of bubble diagrams and just getting out a marker and just huge areas of yellow, red. There's no play smart making. And so the 2015 plan, I think, has some very good, big concepts. But I would say it was very weak in placemaking. And that's what you need. In our opinion, what you need is placemaking. And you need to create a vision. It doesn't have to be done exactly like this. I mean, I'm sure each one of these projects take a lot of effort. And they'll find better ideas than we had. But it helps get people on a certain trajectory.

Yeah, I hear that. And I agree with aspirational and visionary. I also know just from what I hear from a lot of folks, I don't want to say everybody, but I hear from a lot of folks that preservation of historical downtown or a semblance of what we have here, that which makes us unique, in my opinion, better than some of our neighboring central Florida cities that sometimes we get compared to. I just want to make sure that folks are hearing that that is being incorporated and is important Because when there's lack of those words, I think mine goes to it's not on the board anymore. It's not a part of the plan.

I think one of the best examples of that is what we're calling Keeler Park. I don't think the area actually has a name, but there's a part there called Keeler Park. So we call it Keeler Park. and um instead of like proposing redevelopment we we kind of listened to the residents they resisted the parking proposal they resisted an effort to put in townhouses um and so what we did is we actually proposed things that would kind of strengthen their neighborhood identity and try to keep that it's very tempting just to sort of develop the whole redevelop the whole thing I just want to assure you that we made a lot of efforts to be very sensitive.

That's a good call out on the messaging, though. I didn't think about it because I'm like, oh, it's interwoven in this. The things that they're proposing, it's to go with and support and help those things shine, but... Because when we see the two-dimensional layout of these buildings it can feel intimidating but being able to see

what it could look like. One, I think helps us, all of us, when a project comes to us, that we can go, oh, no, I've seen what that could look like. And I want to see the higher quality. But also, I think it can avoid that. Someone's listening to this, and they say, well, at times, you can go up to seven stories and look at all these buildings that we're putting on parking lots. That can feel like we're building in downtown Orlando. And that would not go over well with anybody in Claremont. So I think that some additional renderings help us be able to say, okay, that's what this could look like. Just like the part that looks option one matched with option two. I mean, that took me, I could look at that for another 20 minutes and still feel like I didn't see it all.

So in regards to preservation or historical, did you guys look at the Main Street historic that they did. They did that. So that was all part of that. Oh, yeah.

Actually, I should put that in our precedents. They did an amazing assessment of all the buildings downtown.

Yeah, because I think that would be important. That would equivalent that preservation at that study as well. Because they did a great job with it. It just hasn't been showcased. Sorry, Christian.

No, it's OK. I have a legal kind of question. I mean, normally when Florida cities change their comp plan, change their comp plan and or change the code, things like that, but you don't always see a downtown activation plan. It's not strictly necessary, legally but I guess one of the benefits I mean do you you know you agree it's not legally necessary right yeah so but then the second so I'm I've been thinking about it like why is it so important and I'm wondering is it because of our design center you know that we funded because like here's what I'm wondering because if If it is indeed aspirational for all these properties, you know, that here's an idea of something that could unlock potential and that fits the council and maybe the public's vision for what happens, is that something that could feed into why we would use the design center? Like that someone comes and does, if it fits the activation plan, is that a criteria perhaps for how someone gets access to it?

You asked a question that has a couple different layers to it. The first layer is that, as you know, we're crafting the objective criteria where the development and design center can help people.

And I'm wondering if consistency with the activation plan is one of those criteria.

That's very much one way to do that. So that's a very important purpose for it, beyond just helping. Remember, a lot of planning is not only about creating something good, but preventing something that you don't want. And because, ultimately, whether we like it or not in the United States, we've made the determination that real estate development is a political act. Every developer will say, okay. Hence the term exclusionary zoning. That's right. So the developer is like, okay, the government is my partner because I can't build unless they say yes. All right? And so what that means is there's always an element of politics to it. Well, it's really unfair to an elected representative to have to sit on the dais on every development project and sort of opine, okay, well, how should I handle this? as opposed to providing them with some political cover or shield to say, well, we as a political body adopted a direction we want to go. And so when I'm judging that particular project that came up before us, we could look at it a little more objectively than say, I don't think I like it. Instead, you say, it's not consistent with what the community said.

The context I wanted to give the council and the Planning and Zoning Commission is, you know, this might fit some of what you've already done. And if there were questions, I mean, if you approve, however it's approved, the downtown activation plan, Um, one of the ways you might end up implementing it is through your design center potentially, but there are implications for the property owners as Council Member Bain said. So I just wanted to put that in content.

But also we'll remember this started because we wanted to update the code, which was never updated with the 2015 plan. And so when we're updating the code, we need to know. what the vision is in order to make the code match. So that's how all these have been working. Just so we know context for history.

And the vision thing is a big, important thing. If you don't have the vision, guess what? There's other people coming in who want to develop in your community who have a clear vision of what they want. And so they tend to succeed if there's no competing vision for what you want. And here, what we see is we've got more assets than almost any other city. And that's why you talked about the context in the beginning. We have all these advantages. And if we don't take advantage of them, We end up with siloed mistakes. Okay.

All right.

All right.

Any other questions? Yeah, I just have one comment. I'm glad that the council is sitting in these chairs because that's what we have to do all the time when we're back there and the meetings go six, seven hours. I'm not addressing this to you, Your Honor. I'm just saying. Ms. May, am I right? Sorry for laughing. It's a lot different than just sitting in there. Yes. Am I right, Valerie?

Yeah. one thing. Back to an opinion. When it comes to the waterfront and even how we put it in the downtown action plan, I do think it probably is smart to leave open green space and long stretches along it. So we're talking a lot about infill in the downtown. So I would not be inclined in this particular action plan to start going too far down where ABA was with the swales and stuff. I think that's asking a lot right now and we might want to keep that open space. So I think that's a relevant

All right. Any other, no other questions? I can't understand. Brain overload, brain overload. Nothing else needs to come before the council, the board, I guess.