Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good morning, everyone. It's July 16, and we're starting our planning board meeting. Excuse me. We're starting with item number one. It is the preliminary matters, item 1A, adoption resolutions. We have three this morning. that all the board members can vote on. It's 14-522 Jones Lane Administrative Subdivision, 14-522 Jones Lane Forest Conservation Plan, and Etcheson Solar Forest Conservation Plan. Do I have a motion for approval of these three resolutions? I'll move to adopt the resolutions.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Aye. The second this morning is is the adoption of minutes. We have two. It's the minutes of June 18, 2026, and the closed session minutes for June 18, 2026. So I have a motion for approval of these minutes. But Commissioner Bartley, you cannot vote on this one.

I'll move to approve both minutes from June 18. Second.

All in favor? Aye. Aye. 301. Vice Chair Linden, I believe you voted yes on the resolutions. Correct. Okay, great, great. Great, thank you. And so next we have the minutes for July 2nd, 2026, which all commissioners can vote on to have a motion for approval of minutes of July 2nd, 2026.

Move to approve the minutes from July 2nd?

Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. The ayes have it for zero. And then last, we have two record plats this morning, subdivision plat number 220-26-0190 and 220-26-0230, Cabin Branch. And the second is subdivision plat number 220-26-0720, Chevy Chase, Section 3. Do I have a motion for approval of these two record plots? I'll move to approve the two record plots. Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. The ayes have it 4-0. We will just take a one-minute break and come back with item 12, closed section. But in order to go, we have to vote to go in the closed section. According to Maryland Annotated Code General Provisions Article 3-305B-7, to consult with counsel to obtain legal advice and three 305B-8 to consult with staff, consultants, and other individuals about pending or potential litigation. The topic is Village of Friendship Heights litigation. So I have a motion to go into closed session.

Move for closed session.

Second. All in favor? Aye. The ayes have it. So we'll go into closed session and we'll come back with item number four, Planning Director's Roundtable Report. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome back. We're on item number four, roundtable discussion. with our planning director, Jason Sartori. Welcome forward to your presentation.

Thank you. Good morning, members of the board. For the record, Jason Sartori, planning director. Happy to be here with you this morning to deliver my director's report. It's going to be relatively brief today, but I wanted to give you a quick look at some of the things that we have coming up at the planning department that we're focused on in the next couple of weeks and give you an update on the development tracker. We'll recall from a year ago, we changed the name of our pipeline to Development Tracker. Not so much on the content of it, but just to let you know what we're doing focused on that. Highlight a number of recent staff excursions that I thought would be of interest to the board, and give you one quick personnel update. A look ahead, obviously, we're in the throes of summer here. We have a few more planning board meetings. The last planning board meeting being on July 30th before recess, and then you'll reconvene in September. But over the next few weeks, we'll still be pretty active here in the planning department. We have a couple of Items in the next two weeks at the PHP committee at the council regarding a number of ZTAs that you're familiar with, the data center ZTA, the ADU ZTA, and solar ZTA, all coming up at PHP. And those will be taken up then by the full council when they reconvene after their meeting. August recess. And then during August, we'll be here, continuing to be working. There'll be some administrative approvals that'll go through, and then also just a number of other things that we'll be preparing for the fall, working actively on a number of master plans still. and highlighting there on August 12 through 15. The Maryland Association of Counties have their summer conference in Ocean City, and a number of us will be attending that. It's always a good opportunity for us to learn from other jurisdictions of some of the things that they're doing, best practices, but also an opportunity for us to engage with others involved in policymaking throughout the state and locally. As I mentioned, I want to highlight some of the things we're doing with our development tracker. As you'll recall, last year Montgomery Planning did an extensive level of outreach to those who have development approvals that have not been built, and trying to better understand what are the impediments that they have faced to move their projects forward, but also to try to get a clearer understanding of what the pipeline was. So we called it the development pipeline analysis. And one of the recommendations that came out of that was to rename it. the concept as the development tracker because pipeline suggested in some way that everything was imminent. And as we know, a lot of the projects that get all of their entitlements still never come to fruition because a number of other things take place that are out of their control that might change plans or some things that are within their control. So one of the things we wanted to do was to not just do that as a snapshot, but to continue to try to keep our data on approved development accurate and updated. And so we are going to be going out over the next couple of months with a brief survey back to all of the projects with approvals in the development tracker to inquire about any updates they have to their project status, any major project milestones that they may have achieved, and try to get a better understanding, an updated understanding of the factors that are affecting the project's timeline or next steps. And so we're not going to do this in the extensive way that we did it last time. We're not going to hound people to answer our questions or instead schedule interviews and anything like that. We're just going to be sending out the survey. And our intention is to do this on an annual basis. Part of that is obviously so that we have a better understanding of where things are. We get questions a lot about what's coming, what's not. But also to give those folks who get their approvals kind of get them acclimated to being asked this question on a regular basis. And it's something I think that we should even inform applicants as they're coming before the board for their approvals to know that, hey, we're going to be surveying you every year to get a status of we're not Being nosy, we just want to be able to have an accurate picture of what's coming and what's not. With the board, as we get information on that, we can come back annually and give you an update on what we've learned from those surveys. So then, as I mentioned, I wanted to highlight, show some images and talk a little bit about some recent planning staff excursions. Just yesterday, our design, placemaking, and policy staff toured St. Elizabeth's East, which is located in DC Ward 8. And it's just a couple of metro stops away from the US Capitol. This is a former psychiatric hospital that is adjacent to the Congress Heights station of the metro's Green Line. The team was joined by Lee Quill and Michael Day of Cunningham Quill Architects. And they shared their experience in the transformation of this historic landmark into a vibrant neighborhood and mixed-use community. The challenges and opportunities of adaptive reuse were the focus of the discussion as applied to the residences at St. Elizabeth's East, which is a 252-unit adaptive reuse project, including 50 market rate units, and 202 affordable units for households earning up to 50% of the median family income.

Jason, can you give us streets or locations exactly where this is?

I don't know. Atul can join us.

So if you are looking at a map of Southeast D.C., so just south of the Nat's ballpark on the other side of the Anacostia River. And the Congress Heights metro station is about two or three stops south of the river. So it goes Anacostia waterfront, Anacostia, and then Congress Heights. This campus is due west of the Congress Heights metro station. And it takes up quite a bit of land between the metro station and all the way to the riverfront. So hopefully that orients you. You can see the Capitol and the monument from this site. I mean, the site is incredible and very well located.

Jason, you know this. It is where the Mystics Stadium is. So the Mystics, the women's basketball, professional women's basketball team for D.C. is there.

Yeah, yeah.

Within that campus. It was one of the first, I think, pieces to try to revitalize the area. That's where they're staying.

So it's still under construction. It includes a commercial element that has 23,000 square feet of retail, educational and gathering, activation uses, plus a greenhouse, an incubator space for 13 local residents, and a retail village that offers a chefs in residence program where the food and beverage operators will receive operational support and mentoring from the Jose Andres group. So it's a pretty well thought out and multi-use, mixed-use site. The transformation and revitalization of the St. Elizabeth's Eats campus allowed for renewed historic and cultural resources on the campus while ensuring that new development created dynamic urban places that reflect innovative and sustainable design solutions. And it's visits like this right here in our backyard that inspire our team to think big and to challenge applicants to explore unique solutions to their projects. And so we take this directly into the work that we do on a day-to-day basis.

And just to orient some of the structures on the slide, the top two images in the middle are that retail and community hub. It is a mass timber building, which is intended to be temporary and will be disassembled and moved to another portion of the site when permanent development comes to this block. The buildings in the bottom left and the top right are the revitalized apartments that are They have a high affordable housing component to them. The units are beautiful. They have these large windows and really generous open spaces available to the residents. And then the image in the middle in the bottom of the townhouses is market rate product that was initially built to get some cash flow going on the site. And one of the buildings that's not on this slide here is a brand new kind of Class A medical office building that is sort of occupied by the Whitman Walker Center for Health. So there's a lot of focus on health and wellness in this development. I think one of the big things that's missing, what we heard, is a grocery store that they're trying to attract to this site because it is still a food desert. very inspiring and sort of encompassing project. And we currently are reviewing large-scale projects like Beaverwide Oak, ComSat, et cetera. So going and seeing these large sites and seeing how incrementally they can be built into mixed-use walkable places was very insightful for staff.

Did they talk at all about... Hunter, this is an amazing site. I remember I visited there before they started this process years ago. And it was kind of interesting or difficult to visualize what would come, given what it was originally there and intended to do. And part of that was also the connectivity piece. And I was wondering if they talked about, because the original campus wasn't built to be highly connected. It's obviously surrounded by a couple of highways. Did they talk about how they, or did they, enhance connectivity not just kind of walking through the site, but like from the site to surrounding neighborhoods, so it's not as much of a secluded campus.

Yes, that was very much a focus of D.C. Office of Planning and DEMPED to open up the campus, just like they've done in places like the Walter Reed campus further closer to us. Interestingly enough, the district actually paid for and built the road grid up front. I think this is very different from how we approach these large-scale projects where we are expecting incremental buildup of the road infrastructure. But the district did initially front that cost, which is a lot of cost to build out the roads in partnership with the selected developers. And the land base that they're parceling out now are all design-build contracts. So by doing that, they're also able to ensure that the contractor – will build within a certain amount of time. And if they can't, then they are replaced with somebody else who can. In fact, I think they just started a turnover on one of the land bays just a couple of weeks ago. It was in the news.

So they're sectioning off the whole thing and having different pieces of it being designed and built at one time.

It's just kind of modular. They're all ground leases, 99-year ground leases to different developers.

So I want to thank Atul for bringing his team out to do this, but also I think Paul Mortensen from the director's office and Jenny Burgos from Atul's team who helped organize this.

And Sandra Pereira. I think she was very instrumental in getting this going.

Similarly, at the end of June, staff from a tools division, design, placemaking, and policy, and our environment and climate division went on an insightful and inspiring tour of the mini Howard campus of Alexandria City High School. And this was led by Perkins Eastman and Alexandria City Public School staff. Designed to target net zero energy, the building provides a sustainable, high-performance learning environment that offers enhanced daylight, thermal comfort, acoustics, and indoor air quality. It was impressive to see such a sustainable, civic-minded school in action. Our team was glad to also have been joined at this by our partners at MCPS. So this was just a great opportunity for us to see the things that we talk about here, but also for MCPS to see firsthand how you can create sustainable schools. you know, we've sometimes seen some reluctance here in Montgomery County. We appreciate everyone's commitment to creating engaging, nurturing environments that will shape students and their future impact on the world. And I want to give a special thanks here to Jesus Beck for organizing this tour and for including MCPS in this.

And just one quick note on this. I think we actually want to thank the board for hosting the speaker series because the idea for this tour came directly out of the first speaker series, and we were able to connect with Perkins Eastman and our MCPS colleagues and sort of go and see this in advance of two major capital projects that MCPS is undertaking in Damascus and Eastern Middle School. So it was a great visit.

And then finally, one personnel update to share with you all today. Jenna Gilbert has joined the Up County Planning Division as a Planner 1, handling the intake of development applications. Our intake planners play an important role in the development review process, reviewing each application that is received for accuracy and completion. They coordinate with applicants and their consultants, sometimes rather extensively, to ensure that the applications are ready for review before officially accepting the application and starting our review clock. So you may recognize Jenna. She was an intern previously with our Down County and then later West County planning divisions. She obtained a bachelor's degree in historic preservation with minors in digital studies and museum studies from the University of Mary Washington. And she also earned a master's degree in community planning from the University of Maryland. And so we are excited to have Jenna back and joining our Up County team. So welcome to Jenna.

Complete. Well, thank you, as always, for your detailed reports. I really appreciate that you guys are going to the development tracker, monitor that on an annual basis. It would be always good to know what would get some of those key projects across the finish line. Is there just a little bit, or there's something big? Because we need to jumpstart housing. We're in a housing crisis, and it'd be great to know if there's some support in whatever way that can get those projects across the finish line. And I appreciate your team always continuously learning and doing the tours, going out and seeing how others are doing it or getting ideas that we could use in our counties. And congratulations for Jenna coming back, Ms. Gilbert. So thank you.

I think it'll be really good for us to have that information to see if we see trends, if there are changes as policy changes come in, if that triggers projects to move forward, or if things are still stuck. What else do we need to focus in on? Do things change over time, the reasons why projects don't move forward? I think it'll be really helpful, insightful information for all of us.

Yep. also comparing it to our neighboring jurisdictions. So thank you.

Yeah, I wanted to add my thanks to everyone involved with organizing the tours, both the ones that have happened to date and hopefully more in the future. So it's really cool to see how, in this case, MCPS may start to change some of their thinking around some school design choices. I think that could be pretty transformative, and not just with clean energy, but kind of the entire orientation of the site, as we've talked about in some instances, to kind of further a lot of the goals that we have from a transportation perspective, from an urbanist perspective, and on and on. These are, you know, I've been on, I think I went on one of the tours so far to the site in, the Red Brick site in Southeast DC, and that was incredible for me just to kind of trigger all these questions and thoughts about how we can or in some cases can't, you know, apply some of these lessons locally. But I think, you know, looking forward, these large sites are great to kind of spur uh creative conversations um but i also think you know if possible it could be interesting to have maybe smaller site visits to for example um small residential communities like cottagecore communities or or communities that are sort of building um you know smaller units in ways that we're not currently doing here and understand kind of obviously there's a zoning component there's a building co-comp there's a lot of things that allow maybe them to do it that we we don't or can't do here, but just better understand how they put the pieces together, what they assess the demand to be, the market demand to be for that. Maybe even talk to the residents who live there and assess their experience with these more diverse housing types. So I have no idea how many of those exist in our region, but just one idea that came to mind as we're thinking about more of these tours moving forward and what else can we, in the interest of furthering our housing goals in general in a constrained, difficult market environment and policy environment, what else can we see that could trigger some interesting ideas? I know a lot of those ideas we've probably thought of before, but just to kind of see it in action and talk to people involved could be interesting.

Certainly a lot to learn from other jurisdictions. My understanding is back in the 1970s, Dick Tustian, the former planning director, took a number of planning staff and council members at the time to Montreal to take a look as we were looking here to implement our inclusionary zoning program, the MPDU program. And so while I don't think we need to go to Montreal, there are places more local, but there are things that we can learn from. And it would be helpful to have some of our other policymakers there to see firsthand how some of the concepts and things that we talk about have actually been implemented in places and are working.

No other questions or comments. Thank you again. And we'll just take a one-minute break, get back on schedule here, and start with item number five, the LFBET Montessori School Adequate Public Facilities APF Review. Thank you. We're on item 5, Alefbet Montessori School Adequate Public Facilities Review Request, where staff is recommending approval with conditions. And this morning, we have Mr. Gatling with the Planning Department presenting this item. Thank you.

Good morning. For the record, Saquon Gatling with West County representing the Alefbet Montessori APF review number 202608. The subject property is on Tuckerman Lane in Rockville and within the 92 North Bethesda and Garrett Park master plan area and also within the R200 zone. In the image on the right, you can see the subject property, which is a Montessori school for up to 90 students and up to 12 staff members located in a residential zone. This would normally require a conditional use application. However, it's important to note that, per the zoning ordinance, a private school on land owned or leased by a religious organization does not require approval such as a site plan or conditional use. Use does require an APF determination, and subject property was last seen by the board in 2020 for its proposal to increase enrollment from 39 to a maximum of 90 students. The request was approved with conditions, including the requirements shown on the screen, which include the use of traffic managers for drop-off for a duration of five years, a TMP for the same duration, which is updated annually and discussed with the community in a meeting, and also restriction for no queuing and a max of 50 vehicle drop-offs for the students. These requirements were laid out in condition of approval number three of the previous plan, which was what brings the applicant to the board today. the paragraph for Conditional Approval Number 3, which was granted the applicant the ability to apply to remove the TMP requirement at the conclusion of five years at the discretion of the board, proven that there's a history of compliance without incident. And that's what the applicant is here to request today. All other conditions remain in effect. And the applicant has stated that they will retain traffic managers on site as a part of operations. Posting of the staff report where we received several letters of correspondence from the community generally objecting to increased enrollment, objecting to any future campus expansion, and the desire to uphold the previous approval. To that end, we'd like to be clear that the application before us today does not propose any increased enrollment or expansion to the campus. And the request for removal of condition three is in line with the previously approved plan as it was recorded in the resolution. And there are no other changes proposed for the application. And therefore, the application meets all requirements of the APF findings. They've demonstrated compliance with the previous conditions of approval, and they remain in compliance with the master plan. So staff recommends approval as conditioned. Thank you.

Mr. Gatling, we have two people wanting to provide public testimony. They're on teams this morning. The first is Cynthia Darnell, who is an adjacent property owner, and the second is Daniel Darnell, also adjacent property owner. Ms. Darnell, please, you have three minutes.

Great. Thank you. For the record, my name is Cynthia Darnell. I'm at 11004 Rosemont Drive. I am an adjacent property owner. I've lived here for 15 years in this property. I'm here to testify on the conditions that have existed at this site since we have moved here and makes it difficult for the operation of any school or any commercial activity around our neighborhood. So we live on Rosemont, and this is just east of the school. We have a slight hill to exit our street if you want to go left or right. And it doesn't matter what's going on. It is a game of chicken to get off of our street because of the speeding, the excess speeds around Tuckerman and off of the old Georgetown light. That has existed the entire time we have been here. The only thing that's changing is with the increase in traffic, this situational issue of trying to get off our street has now become more frequent. And so with the school where it's at, one of the conditions that is stated is that there's no queuing along Tuckerman. Well, that condition was put there out of a necessity because we have a blind exit trying to get off this street because of that hill. And so anytime there are cars parked along Tuckerman, we are completely blind. You cannot see anybody coming. And so I have the actual picture of Off our street. And show that to the board. So this is actually the other side of Rosemont. This is the south side of Rosemont. And you can see the hill. And you can see that the school is right there. There's actually somebody passing the school. It's this crest that we have an issue with of seeing people coming down. And you can see the shoulder here. This is where everybody for the school is queuing right now, which they're not supposed to do, but it does happen. And so we are completely blinded. That's the south side of Rosemont. This is my side. I'm on the north side. And so if you look right over here, this is my normal sight picture. You add cars here, I can't see anything at all. And so this has always been a problem. And it's just exacerbated with the school now. And so one of the conditions in that was the school was not supposed to have any queuing on Tuckerman. That happens almost every day. There are parents who park there every single day, take their kids out, and walk down Tigerman. It happens all the time. There's even a no parking sign in front of the school, and the parents still park there. I've had two incidents since that school opened where I almost hit somebody who opened their door as I was driving past them. It scared the daylights out of me, and it scared them too. Luckily, I was not driving very fast. I had slowed down. I drive below the speed limit. but it definitely scared both of us. And that's not an unusual occurrence. In addition, we have had two major rollover accidents coming off of the Tuckerman Georgetown Light and both vehicles landed right here rolled over in this yard. So I wanted to bring the attention to the board that you read in that paragraph about certain conditions. Those conditions have existed here and they will continue to exist. They have not changed. And no, we have not seen it where parents are not stopping and queuing on Tuckerman. That happens. There has been incidents, too, where they have stopped traffic on Tuckerman to allow the driveway to clear. So it's situational. It's not a normal thing, but it still does happen. In addition, we have it where there hasn't been a traffic manager, which hasn't happened very often. But the minute there's no traffic manager, it just turns into complete chaos. Like the traffic will stop on Tuckerman and back up. The driveway backs up, all of that stuff. It goes very quickly. If we have a situation where they become overwhelmed, it backs up. And so this is, there's just nowhere to go. And so that condition still exists. It's going to prevail. This is a residential lot. There is nowhere to go. For this size of operation and people at one given time that are all trying to get through and drop their kids off or pick them up. It just doesn't exist. And so I'm asking the board to keep it in to disapprove that it is removed because the conditions have not changed at all and they're not going to change. So that's my testimony and that's my request of the board is that they disapprove.

Thank you, Ms. Darnell, for your testimony. And next is Daniel Darnell.

Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Okay. I agree wholeheartedly with everything that Ms. Darnell, my spouse, indicated. I'm going to take a slightly different request and stance. I support and agree with everything Cynthia said. But again, good morning. My name is Daniel Darnell. I'm also a co-owner of this adjacent property with my spouse. I respectfully ask the planning board to deny Left Bet's request to remove the TMP and instead ask the board and school to reaffirm their commitment to 90 students being the maximum at this facility. I understand there was a lead off that that's not on the agenda, but I ask you to hear me out and here's why. The TMP request should not be viewed as a simple administrative change or considered in isolation. It's well known around the neighborhood that the school is exploring acquiring surrounding property and the neighborhood has reasonable concerns that removing the TMP could become a stepping stone toward future requests to expand enrollment or increase the intensity of the school's use of the facility. Throughout the approval process, the school represented to both the neighborhood and the planning board that 90 students was the requested and appropriate capacity for this facility. The planning board also previously indicated in its July 2020 hearing that it did not envision the school's facility being approved to serve more than 90 students. It's in the transcript. I recommend anyone go back and listen. The chairman at the time had said those almost exact words. Those representations were really important to the community's understanding of what was being approved. Anything short of explicitly reaffirming that 90 students is the maximum limit risks making the prior commitment effectively meaningless. The neighborhood does not have the same time, financial resources, or access to legal representation needed to repeatedly, and I stress repeatedly, oppose incremental requests. Today's T&P requests can turn into a request for 110, then 130, then 200 students. Who knows where it ends? Residents should not be required to restart this process every few years simply because board members and staff understandably have changed and are understandably unaware of previous commitments, however formal or informal, made by the board and school to committing to 90 students. In closing, the passage of time should not erase prior commitments made by the school and the planning board. This change to the TMP cannot be viewed in isolation from the school's attempts to acquire surrounding property and cannot be viewed in isolation from the school and board's previous repeated commitments to 90 students being the maximum. We urgently request the board to please retain the traffic management plan and, most importantly, expressly reaffirm that 90 students is the maximum enrollment permitted at this facility.

Thank you, Mr. Darnielle. We really appreciate you and your wife providing testimony. So next, is there someone from the school here to, yeah, please come up and provide any feedback you may have and also addressed going on the street and irregularly, regularly, and please.

Absolutely. So Nancy Reglin, counsel for Alifet Montessori School from Schulman Rogers. With me today is the head of the school, Eilat Likhtash. So between the two of us, we can answer any questions. But let me address preliminarily. If you look at the resolution that approved the 90 students with all the conditions, We're only asking to change resolution condition number three, which is the imposition of a TMP with the opportunity right there in that condition to come before the board that if there haven't been any issues, if the board determines that it's satisfied, that it can be removed. In many other school cases, that's like an automatic termination. But in this case, we needed to come back under that condition. The other conditions of the resolution remain in place, the total number of students, the no queuing on Tuckerman Lane, and a number of other things, like the key things that the neighborhood is concerned about. Those conditions in the resolution we're not asking to change. The TMP only covers daily counts of cars coming onto the site with monthly reporting, which has been done for five and a half years, without exceeding the maximum number of cars, of 50 coming onto the site during the peak hour, 7.30 to 8.30, no queuing on Tuckerman Lane by vehicles entering the site, an on-site certified traffic manager. Most of the time, it's an off-duty police officer, but the school also has state-certified traffic managers that step in and also do it. There have not been the issues of queuing on Tuckerman Lane. There is a police officer during that peak hour, and there has never been a report of queuing. The certified traffic manager ensures that that is not happening. And as we presented at the first hearing in 2020, which I understand most of the board was not there, we actually showed an accelerated vehicle video showing that cars are on this site for less than one minute each. as they come to drop off, because the way this school works is that the school staff are out there, and they remove the child from the car as soon as it pulls up to the door, and the parent keeps moving. And the certified traffic manager allows them to make right and turn and left turns out of the site in order to not have queuing on Tuckerman Lane. Everything that we have indicates that this school has been in total compliance with the TMP for almost six years. And we're asking for the TMP, which is the reporting, and the annual community meeting to be terminated. We are keeping in place the certified traffic manager because that's in the best interest of everyone, the public and the school, to manage the exiting traffic from Thank you.

Would the director like to make a presentation, or you'll just respond to questions?

No, but I understand if you want to say anything, but we do not agree with the testimony of the neighbor regarding our impacts on Tuckerman.

Do you have any... Video or photographs of what occurs when parents drop off and pick up the students?

So we did have a video in the record on the date that we applied. I do not have it teed up to show you today.

How many students were in the school?

So there's 85 students in the school currently.

No, on the date you applied. If you showed a video on the date you applied, was the student population the same as it is?

No, I think there were 39 at the time. So we were showing basically how we could get them through. And then we had a traffic report doing the calculations on moving it through. as the school built in population through 90. And the most current peak, 730 to 830, of the school, it's generally about 30 cars actually come onto the site. There was one day in November for some reason last year that there were 40 cars. cap is that we cannot have more than 50 cars. So even at 85 students with an enrollment cap of 90, even if all five of those additional students, if the school grows to 90, if they all came in a single occupancy vehicle, and by that I mean one single parent driving one student, if the normal is 30, And the peak ever recorded was 40 coming through. Those five additional cars would not get us to our cap of 50 cars coming through during that 7.30 to 8.30 hour. The school implements a number of different things. One is they train all of their parents on the entering and exiting. They recommend and facilitate carpooling among families so that there are multiple students per vehicle. And then they also stagger the time that students are coming onto the site based on certain ages. So all of those things have proven to be fairly successful. in fact, successful instead of fairly successful, in managing their requirement, which is to not have more than 50 cars enter the site during that peak hour on Tuckerman, and second of all, to not have any queuing on Tuckerman.

So here's where I am on this. There was a requirement that The applicant provide annual monitoring. And it said in the resolution, if they did it for five years and met the requirements, that they can petition for the requirement to go away. It appears from the information given to us that they did this monitoring. It was within the limits of the no more than 50 during a certain period of time. It's even less than that. They met those requirements. If the board voted to transportation management plan, they still have the requirement that they can't have more than 90 students. That does not go away. That does not go away. If they ever wanted to increase their enrollment, they would have to come back for this. So there are guardrails there, if we voted to eliminate the Transportation Management Plan, that they cannot have more than 90 students. Well, my question I had is, if you How, if a resident or a community member, whomever, wanted to believe that there was queuing on the street there, where would they provide that feedback? Do they call the school? I mean, how does someone provide the feedback? I mean, are you getting?

So unofficially, they obviously can call the school. at any time and have a complaint and neighbors have for different reasons, the children are too loud in the backyard, whatever their complaint might be. But the second is they can also reach out to the park and planning because we submit, we have been submitting monthly to your intake and regulatory people this monthly report of the daily counts on the site And included in that report is if there have been any conditions of queuing or any other incidents around the school that they needed to report. So we report those monthly on a daily counts. And so it is the intake and regulatory. group that would receive those, any complaints that a neighborhood might have.

But given this, just say this report goes away, so people would call the school, and you would address it that way?

We would address that.

So I'm in favor of removing the Transportation Management Plan for the reasons I gave, but I'd like to hear for the other board members.

Stephanie Dickel, for the record, I just want to say that the residents can also reach out to MCDOT. And it is our understanding that MCDOT has not received any complaints.

So how would they know they should reach out to MCDOT?

That's the first we've heard of that in five years. We can assure that they have a contact person.

OK. OK, great. Any other board members?

I think I understand the reason to apply for the removal of the TMP, or at least maybe a couple of the reasons. But from your perspective, could you describe kind of your interest in removing it?

So this is a very small school, 90 students and only 12 staff. This is a very small Montessori school. And so administratively, to do these counts every day and report monthly, that is not what your standard has been at Park and Planning. Most of the other schools that have monitoring are reporting semi-annually or annually. and maybe even counts only twice a year, whereas this school had imposed daily counts and monthly reporting, which they've done religiously, pun intended, religiously for the last almost six years.

So I think my knowing that there is a little bit of... at least with the testimony we've received today from the Darnells, I don't know if their sentiment is kind of more broadly shared in the immediate neighborhood. My concern with removing the reporting entirely is it could lead to a lot of disagreement over what the actual conditions are at the school. So say, you know, neighbors continue to be, or some neighbors continue to be unhappy with her kind of exit onto Tuckerman. And they perceive a certain level of traffic coming and going during the peak hour. And they make assumptions about how much is going to the school. But we no longer have any way to validate that. It feels to me like it could actually lead to more conflict with the school, which I think is not what anyone wants. Which gets to my second point, which is the removal. The other piece of this is the removal of the annual meeting with the community. which, so could you describe your, is that, you actively, that's part of this, you actually want that meeting to go away?

Yes, so we file an annual report. Monthly, we file an annual report with Park and Planning, and in that annual report, we give an overview of how many students were enrolled in the school in the prior year, And then any incidents, so like a lot of information about how the classes are staggered. There's a lot of information that's provided about what the enrollment and the operation of the school is. And then there's a projection for the next school year, what the increased enrollment would be going to and any changes that there might be in the staggering of the classes, et cetera. And that report is what's discussed with the community. So we've been doing it for many years, and there are really only four or five people who ever attend, usually the Darnells, because they are adjacent, and the community association.

Mm-hmm. Well, that seems relevant then. I assume the community association probably distributes some information to the neighbors.

I just want to make clear, Darnell does not represent the community. No, I understand. There's a community association, and we're in close touch with the community association. Any complaint can go to the community association. They also hire an off-duty police officer if needed. Never been the situation. We've been in compliance completely. Darnell's opinion is Darnell's opinion. It has nothing to do with real facts. There was never queuing. Our traffic planners and off-duty police officer are monitoring it. And if there's any issue, they address it with the school. We never saw queuing because... It is enough space for the cars to move around, and it is a staggered arrival, meaning one class arrives at 8, one at 8.15, one at 8.30, and then after 8.30. So we have never experienced that.

Yeah, I understand that. I mean, I don't want to – I don't think we can litigate exactly, like, is there carriers or not. No, no, just one more thing. The subject of the TMP is just the two things that – You brought up, not the queuing.

Correct. It's also whatever Ms. Darnell showed as parking area, it's not a parking area. There's no parking there at all. There's no on-street parking from Rosemont past the school. Not past the school. To the school, there's no parking.

No, I understand. It sounds like there's a shoulder that some cars theoretically could take advantage of. I understand there's no actual parking allowed.

No, there's no parking there at all. It's literally across until you reach the school. You can only park in front of the school.

No, I understand that's what's allowed. I'm talking about the space, the space in the roadway for vehicles.

I have never, ever seen a car parked there, ever. Okay.

And I think you had a brief picture of what the queuing looked like on the school property because it's a double lane going around the loop to drop off. So there's quite capacity on the school loop.

For cars to prevent the queuing on so I guess but my final question then is you mentioned You know other schools or in other situations so focusing on the TMP the reporting and meeting Other examples might be annual reporting you mentioned that Or biannual is that something that you're open to kind of I understand the administrative burden of doing this monthly for sure and It's obviously, it still requires kind of counts, probably on a daily basis. But is that something you'd be open to monthly or not monthly, annual reporting?

The draconian requirements of daily reporting doesn't exist anywhere in the county.

Except for this.

Except for us. You have put it on us for five years.

I think what I understand is your question is, You're saying is the only time you have a community meeting is for this?

Yeah, we go over the annual TMP, which is what I just described, the current school year and then the projected enrollment. And we go through that just so the community knows where we're going. So that's the community meeting. It usually lasts half an hour.

That's the community touch point, regardless of what.

Under the TMP, correct. We do it before the next school year starts.

Could I comment on this? Could I please comment on this annual meeting? Sir, excuse me, sir. Please.

The community meets regularly. There's association. They meet regularly. They can meet together. They can invite us for a meeting. There's a whole organization in this community. It's well done.

The association does not represent us. We are not members of it. Yeah. We are not the LCA. We are an adjacent property owner.

We are not represented by the LCA. Excuse me, ma'am. Could the Garnells go to the community meeting if they wanted to?

Yes, at any time. You don't have to be a member to go to a community meeting.

So my final question, then, is I'm just trying to kind of understand that the 50 vehicle limit will remain, correct? On a daily peak hour, that's not going away? I'm just trying to anticipate. Like, it would be nice if we could.

Condition number four is there's no queuing, and the 50 limit is number five.

Ideally, there is a situation which not everyone's always going to be happy. I understand that. But ideally, there's a situation where this won't have to continue being kind of relitigated within the community, limit the amount of potential conflict between community and the school. So I'm wondering if the 50 vehicle limit remains, but the counting goes away, what is there to sort of understand if more than 50 trips are coming?

It's how you operate the school comes into play in this area. So arrival at the critical time of 7.30 to 8.30, we enabled the staggered arrival. So if the school starts, let's say, a staff meeting or a parent meeting, it happens only after those hours. We adjusted all our operation to allow that to happen.

I understand operationally you're doing what you can. I 100% understand that. I guess this is more a question for staff. Is this a concern for staff, that there is a vehicle limit requirement, but the counting is going away? And what does that mean for compliance? I'm just curious. Because this does seem like a unique situation. I don't think anyone has an interest in overburdening this particular school. I just want to make sure that there's not some inconsistencies, or we're not actually adding to potential conflict down the road.

For the record, Richard Brockmeyer, transportation planning supervisor. The reporting would go away, but if the community or somebody wanted to sit out there and collect counts and demonstrate to us that they were not in compliance with the condition that will stand, that they're limited to 50 trips, then we'd have to take enforcement action. But they have demonstrated for five years that they have not exceeded that.

OK. And are there other, this is not the only, I thought we had another school where they have limits on how many people can be there and how many people can, I don't know, wasn't there another school that had issue with parking and this other thing and they had a similar plan or am I wrong?

So there are several private schools that have TMP requirements. They really do vary by the specific school.

OK. OK. So any other comments or questions from the other board members? You're good? We had one board member that I mean, I'm supportive of approving staff's recommendation. I understand, Commissioner, Vice Chair Linden, that if something comes up, how does someone say, yes, they're complying, they're not complying. But Mr. Brockmire gave his thought on that, that the community or someone would have to do the counts. I'm also... Given that there's also an opportunity, there are community meetings through the association. If the residents had issues, they could go to the community association, whether they're in part of the community association or not, and say, we have issues. And they could bring it up. I like your, I mean, it's important that the community, that the school reaches out to the community. They have these opportunities. So for that, I'm supportive of the staff's recommendations. They have been meeting the requirements. I'm also concerned about the burden that someone else has to do with a lot of reporting, especially a smaller organization. So those are my comments. So is there a motion to approve recommendations with the conditions presented? which is specifically removing the transportation management plan.

Yeah, I'll move to approve staff's recommendation with conditions. I'll just briefly add that I hope that if comments do come into the school about queuing that folks do see, that you'll be kind of willing to look into that. It's outside the scope of this TMP discussion, but if there is potentially dangerous situations exiting a particular street, I think we can all kind of understand kind of that concern. I think we all live in neighborhoods that have dangerous streets, and we don't want to exacerbate that. So I just hope the school will be willing to listen when those come in.

The school would not want to violate one of the other conditions of its approval, so absolutely they would.

So yeah, move to approve.

A second.

All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. The ayes have it 4-0. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you to the Darnells for providing your testimony. Thank you. We're going to take a two minute break and go with our next item, which is item number six, the 8001 Wisconsin Avenue Sketch Plan Amendment, where staff is recommending approval with conditions and also We're also recommending staff to adopt the resolution at this meeting. Thank you. We're on item number 6, 8001, Wisconsin Avenue Plan Amendment and Preliminary Plan Amendment, where staff is recommending approval with conditions, and we will also vote to adopt the resolution at this time. This morning, we have Zekimia Zolf-Gengharian. presenting this item.

Yeah, so before we start, for the record, so this is who joined the West County team a few months ago. And we're very pleased to have her on the team. And this is her debut at the planning board. So we know that you'll extend her every difference. Yes. Welcome.

Thank you. Good morning. And again, for the record, this is Kenya Zulfagirion with the West County Planning Division presenting the 8001 Wisconsin Avenue Sketch Plan Amendment number 32021005A and Preliminary Plan Amendment number 12021014A. So as a summary, staff recommends approval with conditions of the sketch plan amendment and the preliminary plan amendment. And we'll go into an overview of the project. With approval of the request, the sketch plan amendment will be valid for an additional four years. The preliminary plan amendment will be valid for an additional six years. The adequate public facilities, or APF for short, for the preliminary plan amendment will be valid for an additional five years. Property is located in Bethesda within the 2017 Bethesda Downtown Sector Plan and the 2025 Bethesda Downtown Sector Plan Minor Master Plan Amendment Area. 2.74 acres. It has frontage on Wisconsin Avenue and is bounded by Highland Avenue to the north, Tilbury Street to the east, West Virginia Avenue to the south, and Wisconsin Avenue to the west. The Chase Avenue Park is located to the south of the subject property. Previous approvals for this application consists of a planning board approval on January 26, 2023, which approved a mixed-use development proposal. The approval details are seen on this slide. This application is a sketch to extend the sketch plan validity for the submittal of the site plan from the current expiration date of February 8, 2027 to a new date of February 9, 2031. the preliminary plan validity from the current expiration date of March 10, 2026 to a new date of March 10, 2032, and a waiver to extend the APF validity period from the current expiration date of March 10, 2028 to a new expiration date of March 10, 2033. The sketch plan amendment number 32021005A requests to extend by four years the period of time within which a site plan application is required to be filed. Pursuant to the zoning ordinance, once a sketch plan is approved, a site plan must be submitted within 36 months unless a longer period is established in the approval resolution. In this case, the resolution approving the sketch plan provided that the site plan must be filed within 48 months or by February 8, 2027. All other binding elements and conditions remain the same, and the proposed amendment does not alter the intent of the previous findings, which all remain applicable. The preliminary plan amendment requests to extend the preliminary plan validity period by 6 years and amend the adequate public facilities validity period from 5 years to 10 years. The current preliminary plan validity period was set to expire on March 10, 2026, and the applicant made a timely request for extension prior to this date by filing the subject application on February 6, 2026. The subdivision regulations allow the planning board to consider the extension of the preliminary plan validity. In 50, the board may grant an extension for a preliminary plan as shown on this slide, and in particular, the occurrence of significant, unusual, and anticipated events beyond the applicant's control and not caused by the applicant have substantially impaired the applicant's ability to validate the plan, an exceptional or undue hardship, as evidenced in part by the efforts undertaken by the applicant to implement the terms and conditions of the plan approval in order to validate the plan would result to the applicant if the plan were not extended. The applicant notes the following reasons for the request, which include market conditions, rent stabilization, interest rates, and construction costs following the pandemic as the basis for the delay in the development timeline. The planning board may only grant an extension to a preliminary plan the minimum amount of time it deems necessary to validate the plan, for example, to record plants. And it must only grant an extension to a preliminary plan that has a valid APF ordinance unless further extensions of the APF validity are allowed or pending. The applicant notes that the following reasons that are shown on the slide are justification for that request. Plan's APF ordinance would end on March 10, 2028. The applicant is requesting a five-year extension of this validity period for five years. To a validity period extension, the applicant is requesting the planning board waive the requirements of the non-residential or mixed-use subdivision section of the sub-division ordinance. may extend the determination of a preliminary plan for non-residential or mixed-use development beyond the otherwise applicable validity period if the Department of Permitting Services issued building permits for structures that comprise at least 40% of the total approved gross floor area for the project due to the status of the record filing and the other pre-construction requirements, The applicant at this time has not pursued building permits. Therefore, in addition to the fact that the proposed development consists of a single building, the building permits would not feasibly be issued for only 40% of the gross floor area. Additionally, another provision that they're requesting a waiver for is one that limits the duration of the time for which an extension can be requested. The section states that the length of any extension of the validity period granted must be based on the approved new development schedule, but must not exceed 2.5 years for a subdivision with an original validity period of seven years or less. The original approval included a five-year APF validity, and the applicant is requesting an additional five, so they are requesting a waiver for another 2.5 years. The applicant has complied with all noticing requirements for this project, and the notice of application was mailed by staff. No correspondence has been received on this proposal. With that, staff recommends approval with the conditions of the sketch plan amendment number 32021005A and preliminary plan amendment number 12021014A with the waiver request. That concludes the presentation. Thank you.

Thank you. Would the applicant like to make a presentation?

Good morning. Matthew Gordon from the law firm of Selzer-Gervitch on behalf of the applicant, 8001 Wisconsin, LLC. And to my right is Brian Downey on behalf of the applicant. with staff's recommendations. We appreciate all the time that they put into preparing the staff report. We agree with all the conditions and all the reasons, the challenges that were cited in their presentation and we're available to answer any questions. The only thing I would note is that for the APF, the project, when it was originally approved, it would have been eligible for up to 10 years of validity. So we're just asking for the additional five years that it would have been eligible for. And then in terms of platting the property, as long as the validity period is within the APF, it's allowable. So we're asking for a timeframe that is consistent with that. So we think we meet all the requirements and all the findings for this board to grant the requested extensions today. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Any questions or comments from the board members?

I just had a question from my own understanding. This extension is, you know, effectively for time to get to the site plan, correct? And so what maybe the applicant, the question partly for the applicant too, what is the downside of, given the reasons you gave for the extension request, which include, you know, the marketing conditions, you know, local policy and things, which makes some sense. But what is the downside from your perspective of just moving to site plan? even given those conditions and not needing this extension request.

So one of the unique things about Bethesda that recently changed with this board's help and the council was, I think at the time that we pursued, the applicant pursued the preliminary plan with the sketch plan. That's not orthodox. I guess it's a little bit unorthodox. A lot of times you'll wait to do preliminary plan and site plan together. But the reason why we did that was because we had to abandon a couple paper alleys. And so in order to get a sketch plan that covered the whole site, we had to combine them. And the reason for not moving to site plan before was that there was a two-year period where you had to apply for building permit. And that only recently got modified. So now, in theory, there's a little bit more room to get a site plan approved before it gets expired. But there's still considerable expense that would go into taking the project to the next stage, which I think Brian can probably speak to that part of. Sure.

Sorry, did you have anything to add to that?

I could, I suppose, if need be. Brian Downing, thank you very much. The initial The initial reason for not going to site plan now is that we wouldn't have any expectation we'd be able to go beyond that phase. And there's a considerable expense in the site plan. So it would be best to wait until we're more confident that we could proceed. There's certain things beyond that that we would not do, including preliminary plan and record plan, actually, because at that point, you know, you've really committed. Right away, you've committed your land. So we wouldn't imagine starting the site plan until we have some degree of confidence that we could proceed with the project.

Requests are also considered for site plan. Sorry. If you do a site plan and it is approved, there is a period of time to go to do everything you mentioned, right? You know, record your plaid and on and on. Are there extension requests associated with that part of the process post site plan? I guess that's, is that something that we matter for DPS or how does that work kind of post site plan?

I think now that the Bethesda is like the rest of the county, typically the site plan is, Once it's approved, you have to certify it within two years. And then it's valid so long as the preliminary plan remains valid. So by filing the site plan, the sketch plan would be validated, but then the preliminary plan would control sort of the overall timeline for filing a record plat and obtaining building permits for APF.

Okay. Got it. Got it. Thanks. Yeah, I was just curious how these kind of from an extension standpoint and kind of where you would make decisions to either proceed or pause. I'm just kind of curious the decision making around that. So thanks.

I'm supportive of the request. Just a quick question, just from a timing point of view. When you're ready to say a year from now, you say we're ready to move forward, right, and you start spending money to finalize your preliminary plan and site plan, like, Just out of curiosity, how long would it take once you decide you're ready from the time you took filing your site plan? Will that be, out of curiosity, a year, two years, half a year? What do you think?

I suppose I could break it up into pieces, but there'll be... I'm going to say I'm not familiar offhand. I don't recall offhand how much architecture needs to be developed for site plan application. I'm going to say it's probably four to five months to prepare the application because the time needed to engineer, the time needed to prepare probably primarily architectural design. It's a time spent processing the site plan, and then it's a time spent certifying, a time spent with final engineering for your site work, your building permit, pulling the building permit. The approval process, once initiated, takes, say, 18 to 24 months. Add the time up front to that, another four to five. So it could be anywhere from two to two and a half years. And it's at that point.

To pull a building permit.

Yeah. And it's really at that point that then you're ready to, I think, from a practical standpoint, file your record plat. Because when you file your record plat, then you've given away your land. And that's really when you're committed. You're committing yourself.

OK, thank you.

File your record plat, pull your building permits, and get started. So, yes.

OK, great. Thank you. So I have no further questions or comments. Any of the board members? And so is there... A legal department. Is it two? Well, two votes. So we'll do the sketch and preliminary plan together, and then we'll do the resolutions separately. OK. So is there a motion to approve the 8001 Wisconsin sketch plan amendment and preliminary plan where staff is recommending approval with conditions?

I'll move to approve the amendments to the sketch and preliminary plan.

Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. The ayes have it, 4-0. And is there a motion to approve the adoption of the resolution?

Move to approve adoption of the resolutions.

Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. The ayes have it, 4-0. Thank you so much. Hopefully the conditions change where you can move forward with the project. Thank you. We're just going to take a two-minute break to get back on schedule here. Come back with item number seven, friendship, high-h sector plan, working draft. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. We're all looking forward to, as will all of the presentations today, the item number seven, Friendship Heights Sector Plan Working Draft, where staff is recommending that the board approves the Friendship Heights Sector Plan Working Draft as the public hearing draft and set a public hearing date. So today, we have Atara Margolis leading us through this presentation. Welcome.

Good morning, Chair and Commissioners. For the record, Atara Margulies, Master Planner in the West County Division. We are here today to share with you the recommendations in the Friendship Heights Sector Plan Working Draft. We'll start off with a quick review of the plan boundary and schedule. Then we'll follow that up with the planned vision and some background on the real estate market in Friendship Heights as a backdrop to the planned recommendations. We'll then review the plan-wide recommendations first and then follow that up with site-specific recommendations and finally cover the implementation. As a reminder, this is the map of the planned boundary. It includes all of downtown Friendship Heights along the Wisconsin Avenue corridor, including the village of Friendship Heights. And it also includes the blocks of the Brookdale neighborhood east of River Road and the former Geico property. I also want to note that we studied the context around the plan area, including the neighborhoods to the north, east, and west, and the DC blocks south of Western. This was all part of our context study area for this effort. It informed our engagement, our existing conditions analysis, and more. And our recommendations for the plan area take into account the conditions that surround it. We have also been coordinating with DC Office of Planning and are taking into account the proposed zoning and development changes for the blocks of Wisconsin south of Western Avenue. Here's the plan schedule. We started this plan in the fall of 2024. The scope was approved in February of 25. Visioning followed, taking us through November of 2025. And now we are here with the working draft in July of 26. Just a brief recap on engagement. I know we have presented this at length at the board last year. We started with listening workshops in November of 2024, and planned engagement honestly continues up until this day, even through this working draft milestone. On the right is a snapshot of how the team engaged with the community, and on the left are some key takeaways. Over the many conversations with stakeholders, we heard the most about the desire for Friendship Heights to remain a strong mixed-use center, the need for affordable housing, the desire for more green spaces and improvements to existing parks, the need for community-serving amenities and a safer pedestrian network. And although there is disagreement in the community about how much density is appropriate for Friendship Heights, there was actually widespread agreement that it will be crucial to bring more people to this area to sustain the mixed-use corridor and any future amenities. Building on the engagement and the existing conditions analysis the team completed last year, we have put together a vision statement and several high-level goals for the plan. The revitalization of Friendship Heights will transform this urban neighborhood into a thriving regional destination and a welcoming community where people of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities can live, work, and play. This is the overall vision statement for the plan, and it's supported by these five goals. Bring more people and activity to Friendship Heights via new housing developments and expanded community amenities. Enhance existing connections and create safer ways for people to walk, bike, or ride between Friendship Heights and the surrounding communities. Strengthen the Wisconsin Avenue corridor as a center of activity with opportunities for economic growth. Provide new experiences for social connection, activity, and respite in parks and public spaces throughout the planned area. And achieve a resilient urban area that strives to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Before we move to plan recommendations, we'll provide a brief real estate market context as background for the rest of the presentation. The plan seeks to encourage economic growth in Friendship Heights and to strengthen the existing retail corridor through its recommendations about land use and zoning, housing, parks, transportation, and more. Alex Pemberton, our real estate planner, is going to walk us through the connection between the plan's recommendations and the future success of Friendship Heights.

Thank you, Atara. For the record, Alex Pemberton, real estate planner in the research and strategic projects division. As Atara mentioned, I will briefly Everyone able to see me okay?

Okay, Alex, go ahead.

Okay, sorry about that. For the record, Alex Pemberton, Real Estate Planner with the Research and Strategic Projects Division. As Zatara mentioned, I'll briefly review our prior research to frame how this plan approaches new development and recommendations. Housing is the strongest investment class in Friendship Heights today. Apartments are full, rents are high, and the residences at Mazza, which opened just across Western Avenue last summer, proves the market for the smaller, modern floor plans this area lacks. That said, we face a tough residential construction climate countywide, as we've discussed in the development tracker project. The office market is contracting. Employers are using less space than they did before the pandemic. and demand from traditional white-collar employers has shifted to more amenity-rich areas. Medical practices have been a real anodyne for office market decline, backfilling older buildings and bringing workers and patients to friendship heights every day. Retail is also in transition. Storefronts are mostly occupied, rents are holding strong, but many retail spaces suffer from superannuated design and the tenant mix is shifting from fashion and high-end retail for food and everyday needs. Retail offers the best opportunity to engender a sense of place and deliver desired amenities, but the area needs both supply and demand, new modern spaces and more customers. These conditions require planning and prevention. So to ground the plan in reality, we contracted with RCL Co., a Bethesda-based national real estate consultant to study the market and test the viability of new development. Two findings in particular shape our recommendations. First, RCLCO searched coast to coast for a district like Friendship Heights, but could not find one with its unique combination of features. Geographically small, built around a metro station, dense at the center and quiet at the edges, and defined by this cluster of medical offices without an institutional anchor. There's no paint-by-numbers book that we can use. Everything in this plan is drafted specifically to address the conditions in front of us. Second, for now, housing is what the market can build. Today, townhomes and apartments of six or seven stories built of wood are viable in the right locations, but the numbers do not work for new offices and taller residential towers built of concrete and steel are strapped. And with no public land in the plan area, Implementation of the plan's real estate and economic development goals will rely on private projects. We are planning for projects that can be executed today while retaining flexibility for future changes in market conditions. And together, the existing conditions and market analyses feed into three priorities that form the foundation for everything else my colleagues present today. Priority one. build on the strength of the medical offices because they support these older office buildings. But the plan area needs more than medical office growth, which is why the plan emphasizes placemaking, the streets, public spaces, and amenities that can make Friendship Heights a more desirable place to go to work. Priority two is to grow the daytime population, which includes both workers and given work from home, residents, because the shops and restaurants need more customers. That drives our recommendation for flexibility on opportunity sites to help attract major employers for new homes near Metro and for safer ways to access it all on foot, by bike and by bus. Priority three, make new housing easier to build, informs the market can deliver with affordable homes included and a range of housing options on offer. We will balance the zoning flexibility needed to enable new development with expressed desires for community amenities and sensitivity in the relationships to existing neighborhoods. Now back to Atara for plan-wide recommendations and land use and zoning.

Thank you, Alex. Each plan-wide section will begin with goals followed by recommendations. They will proceed in this order. The plan-wide recommendations will follow the sub-bullets that you see here, starting with land use and zoning, and then we'll move to site-specific recommendations and implementation. So we'll start with land use and zoning. The land use and zoning goals are to encourage redevelopment of opportunity sites in the plan area, to provide flexibility so future projects can be responsive to the market, to strengthen the existing retail corridor along Wisconsin, to promote the development of more housing, including affordable housing, throughout the plan area, to respect the transition of building heights from the downtown core to the surrounding neighborhoods. Recommendations relating to density include updating zoning to replace outdated zones, as we do in all master and sector plans. Similar to the last few downtown plans we've done, we've equalized the commercial and residential values in the CR, commercial residential mixed-use zoning, and this allows for more flexibility when it comes to what can be redeveloped on those sites. We are confirming the existing R-60 zoning for the Brookdale neighborhood, and we'll look at the map on the next slide. And we're revising a few R-60 parcels that are in the downtown core to see our – to be more consistent with the rest of the downtown. And then there are two overlay zones that are not useful at the moment, and we're proposing to – So let's look at the map. So the existing zoning map is on the left, and the proposed zoning map is on the right. For the most part, the plan recommends confirming the mapped density that's here today. Most of the properties in the downtown, as you can see on the left, are zoned CR commercial residential with an FAR value of 3. The plan also makes recommendations confirming the existing zoning for the single-family parcels in Brookdale, and we're not proposing any changes there. So I'm going to review the places where we are proposing a zoning change. First, we'll look at the site of the former GEICO headquarters. So in the existing, there's a piece of the site that is zoned CR3, and the rest of the site is covered with an overlay zone that is a TDR overlay. So that's an overlay that allows density transfers from other sites. And the plan proposes to remove that overlay zone and to rezone the underlying residential density to mixed use, not touching the Brookdale neighborhood park or some of the buffer parcels there next to the park, leaving those as R60, but taking sort of the developable portion of the former GEICO site that does not have a CR designation and moving it to that zoning. Now we'll look at SACS. So this is the former SACS Fifth Avenue site on Wisconsin. In the existing zoning, while the building parcel is a CR, the parking lot is zoned R60, and the plan proposes to move the parking lot to a CR3 as well so it's consistent with the adjacent parcels and provides more flexibility for future development. On the collection parcels, those are already CR with a variety of FARs. And there is a Chevy Chase neighborhood overlay zone here that really will speak about an implementation, but it has really served to implement certain things with regard to the retail. The mixed-use corridor is really well established here, and as you'll see in future slides, we've got a few other things proposed for this site, and the overlay zone won't be as useful in the future. So the plan's proposing to remove that overlay zone and to bring these parcels also up to a CR3, so they are consistent with all the downtown parcels. The parcel at 2 Wisconsin Circle, I'll just note for everyone's information, is at CR5 today, and we are keeping it like that. And the last zoning change is up here at Somerset House. So these two parcels are part of the Somerset House development. It's a private development with several residential towers. surrounded by amenities and green space. Today, it's a zone of RH, which is an outdated multifamily zone, and it has a digital parcel here of R60. We really, to bring the whole parcel into compliance, we have to make both zones CR. Those buildings are quite tall, and it's the only zone that allows 200-foot buildings. So we've proposed a zoning and a height for those parcels that will just bring them into compliance. The recommendations with regard to height are to adjust heights throughout the plan so that the tallest heights are at Western Avenue and Wisconsin Avenue, and yet to also provide transitions from the downtown to the adjacent residential neighborhoods. We do some of that through the proposed mapped heights, which we'll look at in a second. And we have additional height controls that we will go through in the site-specific recommendations portion of this presentation. Here's the existing mapped heights on the left and the proposed mapped heights on the right. The plan proposes to adjust map heights throughout the plan area so that the tallest heights are down by the metro, which is mostly where the tallest heights are today. And we're taking them up a bit. The existing is a 145 with a T, which is also an outdated tool. And on the right, we have the proposed mapped heights. And we're going to 250 on to Wisconsin Circle and 200 down by the metro and up Wisconsin. In the village of Friendship Heights today, almost all the parcels are mapped at a height of 90. The existing buildings, particularly along North Park but also along Wisconsin, are all at 150 or so. And so we have moved the mapped height in this area to 150 just to bring the mapped height up and be more consistent with the existing fabric and also for the opportunity sites in this area, which we'll discuss further on in the presentation. As I mentioned, the plan will also be ensuring that heights transition from the tallest heights at the center to lower along the adjacent neighborhoods. From the mapped heights perspective, we get down to 100 up here and 100 along the Geico site. But we have even further tweaks to that, as I said, that we'll discuss later in site-specific recommendations. And now I'll turn it over to Bhavna, who's going to discuss housing.

Thanks, Sitara. For the record, Bhavna Sivasuramanian, housing planner in the design, placemaking, and policy division. So the housing goals and recommendations for this plan have not changed significantly since preliminary recommendations. Though the community has been vocal around the density and types of housing they want, they generally agree that Friendship Heights needs more housing. So the housing goals and recommendations fall under three categories, housing production, housing diversification, and housing affordability. And as a reminder of the current housing in the Friendship Heights area right now, there are just over 4,200 units, primarily multifamily buildings in the downtown core and then single-family detached homes in the Brookdale neighborhood. And with limited housing development over the past two decades and a steadily aging population, Friendship Heights will need additional housing meet the evolving needs of current residents, and to attract new households. And while Friendship Heights' mixed-use character, transit access, walkability, and public spaces make it really quite a great place to live, residents still have concerns over housing availability, affordability, and diversity. And these are addressed by this plan's housing recommendations. So I'll start with the housing production recommendations. We recommend adding more housing units that are available to renters, families, seniors, and persons with disabilities. These are subgroups we specifically heard from during the engagement process that were facing challenges with existing housing in the plan area. Next, we recommend supporting aging in place by encouraging accessible housing, a mix of unit types, facilities that serve older adults, and walkability to services, transit, and community amenities. So the plan area currently has one senior living facility at Brighton Gardens that has 154 beds. But as older adults comprise 36% of the plan area's population in 2023, there's also a strong need for housing options that support aging in place. Next, we recommend promoting the use of incentives to boost market rate and affordable housing, particularly near transit stations and along major corridors. The downtown of the planned area has both the Metro Rail Red Line and a WMATA bus loop that really serve as opportunities for corridor-focused growth. And the photo here on the slide is of Strathmore Square, a recent example of transit-oriented growth in the county. We also recommend making property owners aware of existing incentives, such as the commercial to residential expedited plan that can help make new office to residential conversions more feasible. And as mentioned in the real estate market section, a thriving office market is really critical to sustaining a residential market and vice versa. But we also want to build awareness of existing incentive mechanisms. And so now moving to housing diversification recommendations. First, we recommend encouraging a mix of housing types and unit sizes that can accommodate young families with children, first-time homeowners, and seniors. Again, these were groups we heard from repeatedly during community engagement, and they expressed concerns over their housing needs being met. In line with this, we recommend incentivizing family-sized market rate units and MPDUs, both in new residential developments and redevelopments. And this would be done through the priority public benefits for the planning area, which will be discussed in the overlay implementation section of this presentation. And the photo here is a park place in Petworth, a mid-rise apartment building in DC, a type that could be viable in this plan area. And lastly, moving to housing affordability recommendations, of the nearly 4,000 existing multifamily residential units in the plan area, only 28 are income restricted through the county's NPDU program. And these are all located in Wisconsin place apartments. And most of the existing market rate rental units are not affordable to lower and moderate income households. meaning that average rates exceed 30% of household income for households earning below 80% of AMI. And so given the limited availability of both income restricted and market rate affordable units, this plan recommends a range of tools and strategies to expand the supply of affordable housing in Friendship Heights. Firstly, Friendship Heights falls under a high-income planning area, the Bethesda Chevy Chase planning area. So it already requires 15% MPDUs in new developments and redevelopments with 20 or more units. So this is not necessarily a new recommendation, but we've included it in the plan just to emphasize that. In addition to the existing MPD requirement, the plan further recommends prioritizing deeper levels of affordability by providing units below 65% of AMI in new developments and redevelopments, again, by making this a priority public benefit for the plan area. And this will be discussed in the overlay zone section. And then lastly, the plan also recommends supporting the county in working with property owners to alert them and obtain existing county, state, and federal incentives. This includes the pilot payment in lieu of taxes, and low-income housing tax credit to help make new affordable housing development more feasible and spur the production of more affordable housing. And the photo on this slide is of the residences at Forest Glen, which was supported by a federal LIHTC program. And 3 quarters of its units are affordable to households earning below 60% AMI. And now I'll turn it over to Audrey to discuss community amenities.

For the record, Audrey Vogel, West County Planning Division, We heard strong feedback throughout our engagement process that community members want more places to gather, more services close to home, and amenities that strengthen a sense of neighborhood identity. Highly requested amenities include a theater, art center, library, and pharmacy with extended hours. These types of amenities are important for the future vitality of Friendship Heights, And the community amenities goals are first to encourage amenities that foster social interaction, civic gathering, and neighborhood identity. And second, expand access to neighborhood serving amenities within the plan area in alignment with the concept of complete communities as defined in Thrive 2050. Given the lack of public land in the plan area, these amenities will largely be delivered through private development. Furthermore, our recommendations are intended to provide flexibility for future development while emphasizing the types of community-oriented amenities that support daily life and create a more active, engaging environment where people not only pass through but choose to stay and spend time. These recommendations include prioritize and incentivize a library, arts or cultural center, and or recreation facility, encourage the creation of third places that are highly visible, comfortable, accessible places where people can gather informally outside of home, and to ensure that neighborhood serving amenities, such as a pharmacy or cafe, are integrated into new development as part of active ground floors. These recommendations will be achieved through incentive density benefits and the overlay zone. Atara will explain this more later in the presentation. Heisu will now share the school's recommendations.

Thanks, Audrey. For the record, Hei-Sue Beck, Adequate Public Facilities Planner from the Design, Placemaking, and Policy Division. So as you can see on the map here, the plan area is currently being served by Somerset and Westbrook Elementary Schools, Westland Middle School, and Bethesda Chevy Chase High School. The middle school and high school boundaries in the plan area will not be affected by the Woodward and Northwood high school boundary change that the Board of Education approved in March. The elementary schools, however, are experiencing significant underutilization. So their service areas may be subject to change by MCPS in an upcoming countywide boundary study that MCPS will be starting soon. recommended zoning, if the plan's recommended zoning is built out to the maximum extent possible, the additional housing units can generate up to 235 elementary school students, 100 middle school students, and 120 high school students in an average year during the lifetime of the projects. MCPS's latest projections indicate that each school serving the plan area will have more than two or even 300 surplus seats in the foreseeable future. This is sufficient to accommodate the students that the plan's recommended growth may bring to the area. So the plan will not be seeking any additional school sites or capital action. That concludes the school slides, and Tyler will be going over urban design recommendations.

Thank you, Kaysu. Good morning, and for the record, I'm Tyler Milam from the Design, Placemaking, and Policy Division. Recommendations have continued to be refined and build on those presented during the preliminary recommendations. The community has continued to express a desire for safer and more usable spaces, a higher standard for the design of buildings and public spaces, and concern regarding the transition between the downtown core and the surrounding residential communities. The urban design goals fall into three different categories. First, the public realm goals seek to support Wisconsin Avenue as the commercial spine of Friendship Heights and transform it into an iconic destination, while building on the existing pedestrian network of the downtown to increase safety and connectivity and enhance access to amenities throughout downtown and to the surrounding communities. Second, the building form goals aim to elevate the overall quality of design in new development projects to deliver buildings that relate to the pedestrian scale, have a variety of building types, and provide visual interest. New developments should also contribute to the gradual transition in both height and density from the downtown. Oh, sorry, I said that already. And third, the placemaking goals strive to foster a sense of place through design, placemaking, and activation initiatives at a variety of scales that elevate local identity and create and enhance public spaces that are identifiable and accessible to everyone. For the public realm, the key recommendations for the public realm are to ensure that streets and parks are fronted with attractive buildings with active and welcoming trees, welcoming uses, curb cuts, parking and parking access to be minimalized to maintain a continuous pedestrian experience. This will also help create a high-quality mixed-use streetscape along the commercial core of Wisconsin Avenue that provides a rich visual experience using architectural design elements, landscape plantings, pedestrian-scale lighting, seating, and signage. Superblocks should also be broken up to provide improved connectivity with an expanded network of public spaces, pedestrian connections, and internal circulation. and public open space should be designed to be easily identifiable and accessible from the street, welcoming and prioritized pedestrian activity. The community expressed a desire to elevate the level of development design, so the plan is recommending that new buildings should be designed to the highest standard with design review through a design advisory panel. Further details will be provided in the implementation section later on in the presentation. This high design standard will promote building design with a positive relationship to the public realm with a clearly differentiated base that relates to pedestrian scale, has substantial variation in massing, facade articulation, transparency, and materials. Including biophilic and activating elements into the design of buildings and the overall site design further integrate the development into the community and the environment. To address the concerns we heard from the community regarding the transition in building heights and density, the plan recommends locating the greatest building heights around the metro station and mixed use center, then stepping down to the development as a development approaches surrounding single family neighborhoods. This was talked about before with zoning, and this also continues down into the building to building scale of a larger development. And the third category is placemaking, where placemaking should strive to support local identity and place-based design by supporting the expansion of placemaking initiatives within the plan area undertaken by residents, property owners, and community organizations through technical assistance, branding, and place management initiatives. Placemaking strategies should be utilized at key locations to create third places and elevate community identity at a variety of scales. And the plan encourages temporary placemaking through amenities and activation within large phased developments. These initiatives would reflect the long-term public benefits that would be provided upon the completion of the project. That concludes the urban design. Next, we'll be passing it to Christina.

Thank you. Good morning. For the record, Christina Sasaki, park planner. Friendship Heights has several nearby parks, but they don't yet provide the full range of outdoor experience the community is looking for. So the primary goal is to create welcoming, comfortable spaces that support active recreation, social gathering, and enjoyment and stewardship of our natural areas. As we heard from the community engagement, access to certain parks is also a challenge. Wisconsin Avenue large blocks and limited shade can make walking uncomfortable and weaken connection to parks and public spaces. A second goal is to improve in strength connectivity, making parks easier to find, easier to reach, and easier to enjoy. In the next two slides, I will briefly recap the overall parks and public space approach and plan wide recommendations for existing parks and public space. Then on the last two slides of my presentation, I will focus mainly on the park-specific recommendations for sites operated by Montgomery Parks and finalized with the overall location of the site-specific new public space recommendations. The plan focuses on two priorities for parks and public spaces. First, it protects and improves the parks and natural areas we heard the community values today, including the wooded areas in the existing commission parks, such as the Brookdale Park as shown in the slide on the left image. Second, it expands the public space network by recommending new gathering and recreation spaces, including private-owned public space, what we are calling the POPs, and other non-MNCBPC public spaces. Together, these recommendations create a more connected, active, and welcoming public space network with the integration of diverse features, some of them shown in the images on this slide. Moving to the plan-wide recommendations. Here, the plan focuses on making existing parks and public spaces more visible, accessible, and connected. Where appropriate, the plan also supports target programming for events and everyday use. Let's turn to the park-specific recommendations for MNCCP. MNNC PPC parks. Notice the three parks in the dark ring on the map. The two parks are inside the planned area are the Wheeler Avenue at the far left on the map and then the Brookdale at the center. And then we have one park, Western Grove, at the far right, sits just outside the planned boundary. Let's start with Wheeler Avenue Park. The plan recommends two types of improvements for Wheeler Avenue Park. First, connect. The plan proposed to strengthen its connection to the large network by improving the visibility and accessibility of the park entries. Montgomery Park has already started exploring these improvements after acquiring the corner lots to create a new pedestrian entrance and improve maintenance access. Second, renovate. This park would benefit from additional amenities that support social gathering, such as swing benches on the photo on the left, the top, tables and chairs, small-scale game areas as shown in the photos on the top right, the bocce court, and in addition to interactive public art. The plan also recommends studying whether the half-basketball court could expand into a full-size multi-use court while considering impacts on the floodplain. In addition, parks will also evaluate the potential future use of the Reynolds House, which the Historic Preservation Planner will discuss further under the Historic Preservation section. Brookdale Park has been managed by the Parks Department for decades, but the agency has never owned it. This plan recommends conveying the park to MNCBPC as part of the GEICO cyber development. One of the major challenges to this park is the lack of a park entrance from the downtown core. So the plan recommends a visible, public accessible, northeast entrance from the downtown core to the GEICO site and its proposed public spaces. The plan also recommends renovating its sports courts as multi-use courts to welcome everybody, adding spaces for active recreation and gathering, and improving the connection to the playground area across Dalton Road. It could include pedestrian crossing treatments or addressing vehicular traffic on that area. Western Grove Park. This park is outside the planning area. The recommendations will focus only on the connections to the park. The plan recommends making the Belmont Park entrance from South Park Avenue more visible and accessible, also adding new entry points that connect directly to the park and improving wayfinding for an existing and proposed public spaces nearby. For new public spaces, the plan emphasizes active and social experiences. These spaces are proposed at large redevelopment sites and are intended to connect with the broader parks and public space network. Their site-specific recommendations will come later in the presentation. On the map, the bright green shows proposed new public spaces. Dark green shows the MNCVPC parks, and pale green shows other parks and public spaces. The orange lines show the new connections among these spaces, integrating the spaces from the edge to the core of the downtown. This concludes with the parks and public space portion. The report will also include recommendations for the remaining existing public space. Next, Ronita will present the transportation recommendations. Thank you.

Thanks, Christina. For the record, Ronetta Zach Williams, Transportation Planner with the Transportation Planning Division. I have transportation goals which are listed on the screen. And in summary, the goals overall seek to enhance transportation safety, efficiency, reliability, and connectivity for all users through improved streets, active transportation networks, transit, and accessible infrastructure. Key recommendations for the pedestrian network include improving pathways between the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods, improving lighting at key locations, and collaborating with the Village of Friendship Heights to remove pedestrian obstructions and install high visibility crosswalks. Additionally, the plan recommends upgrading existing brick sidewalks in the plan area with accessible materials such as concrete, as well as designing and maintaining crosswalks to meet ADA standards, underground new and existing utilities, and improve wayfinding signage. existing protected crossings in the planned area that allow pedestrians and bicyclists to safely cross the street. The pink circles on the map indicate new recommendations for protected crossings along Willard Avenue, Friendship Boulevard and further north along Wisconsin Avenue. The Bicycle Network, the plan is reconfirming the bikeway recommendations of the 2018 Master Plan along Wisconsin and Willard Avenue, River Road, Friendship Boulevard, and the trail extension from Willard Avenue Neighborhood Park. The two updates in this plan are shared road bikeways along the former GEICO site that connect the planned trail to Willard Avenue and Friendship Boulevard. The plan also recommends collaborating with the town of Somerset and the village of Friendship Heights to improve bicycle and pedestrian connections, as well as expand micro mobility options. The plan is recommending repurposing a travel lane in each direction between Western Avenue and Oliver Street to build upon the countywide transit plan, as well as improve reliability and connectivity along the corridor from Maryland into D.C. to areas that are not currently served by the Metrorail, and that include Georgetown and the National Cathedral. with two locations planned for BRT stations at Somerset and Wisconsin, as well as Western and Wisconsin. The District of Columbia also has plans for bus priority along their segment of Wisconsin Avenue as well. Next, the plan has a very long-term recommendation, which would likely happen during redevelopment to explore repositioning the Metro bus loop to a location screened by active ground floor uses, This is a recommendation that we work closely with various transportation stakeholders that included WMATA, MCDOT, SHA, as well as DDOT to ensure everyone was aligned. Lastly, on transit, we have a recommendation to improve accessibility to the Metro Rail Station entrance on the west side of Wisconsin Avenue, modernizing wayfinding, aligning bus stops with protected crossings, and upgrading shelters with real-time information. The plan recommends reducing downtown streets to two lanes in each direction and reducing the target speed on those streets to 20 miles per hour, as well as abandoning or realigning Wisconsin Circle to accommodate repositioning the Metro bus loop, implementing traffic calming on Brookdale residential streets that connect Western Avenue and River Road, implementing safety improvements at existing intersections and consolidating driveways on Wisconsin Avenue. Public parking garages in Friendship Heights downtown. The plan has a recommendation to explore opportunities to integrate a new public parking garage with a mixed use development through a public-private partnership. This recommendation is not speaking to expanding public parking in downtown Friendship Heights, but rather to provide publicly accessible parking spaces for visitors. The plan also recommends increasing the non-auto driver mode share goal that is currently at 39% to 45%. And lastly, to continue encouraging transportation demand management strategies to reduce single occupancy vehicle travel and promote sustainable travel options such as transit or active transportation. It's showing the existing and proposed typical section for Wisconsin Avenue looking north. The top graphic is the existing cross section for Wisconsin and the bottom is proposed. These sections show what can fit within the existing right-of-way or master plan right-of-way if or when road dedication is received through redevelopment. What the plan is recommending on Wisconsin Avenue is a dedicated bus lane in each direction, four vehicle through lanes, two in each direction, and bike lanes, a wider sidewalk, and street trees on the east side of Wisconsin Avenue. And most of these recommendations or new proposals are recommended on the east side of Wisconsin Avenue because that is likely where development will happen during the lifespan of this plan. This slide is showing the existing and proposed typical section for Willard Avenue looking west. The proposed changes to this section here are a vehicle lane in each direction, parking on both sides of the street and constructing bike lanes and additional street trees on the west side of Willard Avenue adjacent to the former Geico site. From typical section for River Road looking north, the proposed recommendation here is to repurpose a travel lane on the east side for bike lanes and a buffer to protect cyclists as well as include a center turn lane. Looking at River Road, but this is the long-term recommendation here. So it retains the center turn lane and vehicle lanes from the short-term section, but includes a street buffer on both sides of the street to protect bicyclists and pedestrians, widens the sidewalk on the west side, and adds a side path on the east side for both bicyclists and pedestrians. Here is the existing and proposed cross-section on River Road within the existing right of way. Here is the existing and proposed cross-sections on Friendship Boulevard within the existing right of way. The changes here would be removing the center turn lane to create a travel lane in each direction, moving the parking lane to the east side, and adding bike lanes and the street buffer to the west side of the street. In the long term, this section would also recommend extending the sidewalk on the west side of the street to 10 feet. of transportation adequacy with master plans are assessed on five system performance metrics, accessibility, travel time, vehicle miles traveled, non-auto driver mode share, and low-stress bicycle accessibility. Each metric compares outcomes between the currently adopted plan scenario, which is the 1998 plan, and the 2045 proposed plan scenario, which is this proposed plan, to assess adequacy at build-out. Stability, travel time, VMT, and non-auto driver mode share metrics analyzed for the year 2045 adopted plan scenario and the year 2045 proposed plan scenario indicate that the plan achieves transportation adequacy for these metrics at build out. The 2045 proposed scenarios which modeled repurposing travel lanes on River and Wisconsin in the planned area, as well as the second BRT test is looking to repurpose travel lanes up to on Wisconsin Avenue between Western Avenue and Bradley Boulevard. and on River Road between Western Avenue and Little Falls Parkway results in fairly similar findings with slightly less auto job accessibility than the adopted plan scenario. However, it is a very minimal decrease and is offset by the notable increase in transit job accessibility. The low stress bicycle accessibility metric is derived from the planning department's bicycle travel demand model. The results for this metric are currently not available, but will be added to the plan's appendix when available. To the master plan transportation metrics, a roadway segment analysis was developed to further understand implications of repurposing travel lanes on both River Road and Wisconsin Avenue. This analysis estimated peak volumes for the year 2045. This calculation estimated a modest decrease in volumes along both River Road and Wisconsin Avenue in the year 2045. In looking at both the existing volumes and forecasted volumes, both support repurposing lanes along River Road and Wisconsin Avenue at a master plan level evaluation. Before any planning or design, the Department of Transportation as well as State Highway Administration would conduct additional detailed traffic analysis. This concludes the transportation segment, and I'll pass it to Hallie to discuss environment.

Thank you. Hallie Johnson, Environmental Reviewer with the Environment and Climate Division, for the record. many community members expressed a deep attachment and affinity for the large, mature trees throughout Friendship Heights, as well as the well-shaded parks and the two tributary slivers that flow through portions of the boundary area. These features contribute to the character of the community, and so the environmental goals and recommendations were developed to support, protect, and enhance these existing natural resources, as well as improve climate resiliency, prioritizing urban heat and energy efficiency. The overall goals haven't changed significantly from preliminary recommendations and R2, Enhance climate resiliency through the implementation of environmental features and infrastructure that can withstand and reduce climate stressors such as urban heat, biodiversity decline, and fossil fuel consumption. Use nature-based design solutions to enhance and increase green cover throughout the community, improving the public and private realm. Improve, enhance, and restore a dense street tree canopy. Restore and improve the ecological health and performance of existing habitats. Prioritize high performance and energy efficient buildings to minimize carbon emissions, reduce utility costs, and the reliance on fossil fuels. Implement innovative urban design principles to reduce environmental impacts and enhance resiliency to create a vibrant and equitable community where people, place, and nature come together. Recommendations are broken into several categories. In nature-based design, we propose that new construction projects must provide a minimum of 35% green cover, excluding any existing forested areas already on the property. Green cover may include the following, either singly or in combination, intensive green roofs, tree canopy cover, vegetative cover or landscaped areas deeper than six inches, and bioretention areas with green cover. We also propose that upon development or redevelopment, sites with existing encroachments into the stream buffers should establish or reestablish minimum vegetated stream buffers in conformance with current requirements. Many established canopy trees whose preservation was repeatedly mentioned during our outreach efforts. The area also has many areas lacking in tree cover. To maintain an increased tree canopy, the plan recommends maximizing tree protection and minimizing the removal of trees on private and public property, preserving trees and finding creative ways to implement tree canopy and biodiverse vegetation into any development, and using the most current state-of-the-art tree protection measures to minimize critical root zone impacts and improve tree survival in both new development projects and streetscape renovation. Implementing cool shaded street implements into streetscape plans during the site planning process, transportation design development, and street renovation and improvement projects. Improving the health and survival of long-term tree canopy success by providing adequate soil volumes of 800 to 1,000 cubic feet per tree. When soil volume cannot be met, use structural cell systems, structural soils, or continuous tree panels. And providing a cooler, more comfortable pedestrian experience along streets through the retention of mature canopy trees and the planting of native canopy trees. While Montgomery County Department of Permitting Services is the primary agency responsible for reviewing and approving stormwater management, the planning department coordinates with DPS, and these recommendations support the goals of managing stormwater by maximizing stormwater management practices and minimizing deviation from chapter 19 of the county's stormwater management requirements, designing stormwater facilities separate from street tree panels to avoid tree removal during routine stormwater facility maintenance, and integrating artful stormwater management into the overall site design when possible. In terms of site design, it is recommended to shade pedestrian connections with native canopy cover trees, use permeable surfaces and highly reflective materials along pedestrian connections, minimize interior roadways and consider providing car-free zones, reduce impervious cover to the maximum extent practicable on sites with more than 80% impervious cover, provide a minimum of 50% tree shade or structured canopy cover in public gathering areas, playgrounds, and bus shelters, When conditions are suitable, maximize use of permeable pavement materials. When practicable, use light-colored reflective surfaces on sidewalks, parking lots, and gathering areas to reduce urban heat and to support resiliency hubs to provide community services and safe havens for people and pets during grid outages or climate emergencies. Resiliency hubs are community-serving facilities intended to support residents and coordinate resource distribution and services before, during, and after a natural hazard event. Hubs can be located on private or public property. The building recommendations are intended to support the climate action plan goals and help the county achieve net zero by 2035. The recommendations also help lower the county's dependence on fossil fuels and increase climate resiliency by decreased decreasing dependency on the supply chain. The building recommendations are to use public benefits from the green buildings category to achieve high-performing, energy-efficient buildings, optimize building and site orientation to maximize passive and active solar energy, incorporate on-site alternative energy generation such as solar and geothermal, micro-goods, cogeneration, energy hubs, and or future renewable energy technologies to the maximum extent practicable. This increases resilience by encouraging centralized electricity and reducing reliance on distant power networks, non-renewable resources, and susceptible power lines during outages. Encourage more vehicle charging stations than are currently required on private property to support the growing demand. And to the extent practicable, provide bird-safe building, lighting, and landscape design using bird collision deterrent standards of the United States Green Building Council Leadership and Energy Environmental Design and or other sustainable green building programs to minimize bird collisions. And we're feasible to prioritize the adaptable reuse of existing buildings. Oh, and now we pass to Rebecca for historic preservation. Thank you, Hallie.

For the record, I'm Rebecca Vallow with the Historic Preservation Division filling in for John Lieberts this morning, and I'll be covering the two historic preservation recommendations. First, historic preservation staff evaluated the Edwin and Julia Reynolds House for designation in the master plan for historic preservation. The Queen Anne-styled house shown on this slide was built by the Reynolds family in 1899 along River Road, the Glen Echo Railroad, and the Little Falls branch. Dressed to and located on the west side of Willard Avenue within Willard Avenue Neighborhood Park, the house faces toward River Road as it was built nearly a decade before the establishment of Willard Avenue. The one-acre property associated with the Reynolds house is outlined here in orange. MNC PPC started to acquire land for Willard Avenue Neighborhood Park in the late 1970s, and in 1995 purchased the Reynolds House for just under $500,000. Montgomery Parks added the house to its rental portfolio, and it remains actively rented to this day. On this map, you can see the house noted by the red arrow along with other park features, such as the path that largely follows the right-of-way of the Glen Echo Streetcar. The plan finds the Reynolds House to be historically significant as, first, the house reflects development patterns along River Road prior to 20th century suburbanization of the area, second, The house is the oldest of the five houses built by the descendants of Louis and Sarah Shoyam, first-generation immigrants who purchased an eight-acre property in 1875. Julia Reynolds was their daughter, and they gifted her a section of their land as a wedding present. The house stands as a testament to the enduring success of their family and their continued presence along the Little Falls branch for over 150 years. This house is the anchor of the kinship network of the Shoyam family. I'm sorry, there was one more. Third, the house remains prominent within the landscape due to its orientation toward River Road and the former Glen Echo Railroad line rather than the suburban streetcar network established with the development of Willard Avenue. It is a marker in the landscape of a former rural past in Friendship Heights. At its public hearing and work session in May 2026, the Historic Preservation Commission evaluated the property against the nine designation criteria outlined in the County Code. The Commission agreed with the staff's findings that the Reynolds House met three designation criteria, as shown on the slide. We will discuss these criteria in more detail during our work session on the recommendation. The Historic Preservation Commission and the Working Draft of the Sector Plan recommend that the Planning Board designates the property as a Master Plan Historic Site. have a similar charge but additional responsibilities during its future work session on the proposed designation the board will also evaluate whether the property meets the designation criteria but the board will then balance the importance of the historic property with other public interests regardless of the planning board's recommendation on designation the item will be included in the planning board draft transmitted to the county council for their review and that concludes our recommendation on the reynolds house Our second recommendation relates to the county's burial sites inventory. The Isaac Shoemaker Family Cemetery at 5202 Murray Road is a known burial site from the mid-19th century. It is outlined in orange on this map. As required by the county code, the burial site will be preserved and protected during the subdivision review and approval process. So next, I'll pass the presentation back to Atara to discuss site-specific recommendations. Thank you.

Thank you, Rebecca. In this section, we're going to review recommendations for four sites in the plan area that the plan recognizes as opportunity sites. As we have discussed in earlier presentations, opportunity sites are properties within the plan area that are underutilized from an existing zoning perspective. So with plan recommendations for height and zoning, this makes them even more likely candidates for redevelopment over the life of the plan. The opportunity sites for this plan are shown on the map. The working draft includes site-specific recommendations for the following sites. All of the sites on the east side of Wisconsin Avenue that the plan looks at is sort of one site. 5550 Friendship Boulevard, which is an office building site in the village of Friendship Heights. Ten small sites that the plan is sort of looking at as one potential site, which the plan calls the Shoemaker Block, because this is Shoemaker Farm Lane right next to it. And then also the former Geico Headquarters site. For each of these sites, I will review a closer look at the zoning and height recommendations. Tyler will talk about urban design recommendations. Christina will discuss the proposed open spaces. And when appropriate, Hallie will discuss any site-specific environmental recommendations. So we'll start with Wisconsin. This is a closer look at the proposed zoning and height for the sites along the east side of Wisconsin. Just to recap, because we're going to look at these sites in detail now, the key proposed changes here include the rezoning of the SACS parking lot. So this is the SACS site where the building is. This is the parking lot. And so bringing this from R60 to CR, and increasing the density a bit on the collection sites, and adjusting the heights throughout, going up to 250 here, 200 for the collection, 150 on this portion of SACS, and then 100 down to the community. However, in order to transition more gently across these parcels, towards the single-family neighborhood of Chebichi's Village. The plan recommends the following additional height controls. To limit building heights along Belmont Avenue between Oliver Street and Park Street, and including along Oliver, so following this purple line that you see here down towards Park Street, the building heights along those frontages would be limited to 45 feet. And then as the frontage continues and it's facing the Belmont Buffer Park, continuing all the way down towards Grove, frontages along this line would be limited to 60 feet. The height limit differs because the relationship between the site and Belmont Avenue is different than the site and the Belmont Buffer Park, which Tyler will explain in the next few slides.

Being at the north end of the site, we're looking at Belmont Avenue should be designed as a two-sided residential street from Oliver Street to Park Street. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, from Oliver Street to Park Street and where Belmont River Park begins. Any development along this stretch of Belmont Avenue and Oliver Street should be designed in a manner compatible with the residential street without a continuous facade. The plan also recommends a shared street across from Somerset Terrace and enhanced pedestrian connections to Belmont Buffer Park. End of the site. Along Western Avenue, we are recommending that the development should, or the plan's recommending that the development should explore redesigning the layout of Wisconsin Circle to create a larger, more cohesive block. Redesigning the block would allow for greater flexibility in the building layout and provides opportunities for a more efficient WMATA and ride-on-bus facility. The existing bus facilities are constrained by the existing building, small block size, and the tight configuration, as well as the proximity of the intersection of Wisconsin Avenue and Western Avenue. This redesign could also allow for much needed facility improvements. And lastly, any redevelopment should create a sense of arrival to downtown Friendship Heights using public art, landscaping, lighting, programming, and other design features that would foster local identity. These gateways should be located at the intersections of Wisconsin Avenue and Western Avenue, as well as the intersection of Wisconsin Avenue and Somerset Terrace. We also have some site sections through all the different opportunity sites. We have three for Wisconsin Avenue sites. This section locations for all of them are shown by the black arrows in the upper right. This section is cut at the north end of the site. And on the left of the section, you can see Wisconsin Avenue fronted by buildings with a potential maximum height of 100 feet, shown with a yellow gradient. And on the right, we see the buildings at a maximum potential height of 45 feet along Belmont Avenue. And on Belmont Avenue, building setbacks, in addition to reduced heights, street buffers, and sidewalks would help continue the residential design of the street. between Wisconsin Avenue and Belmont Buffer Park, just north of the recommended Civic Green, which we will hear more about for Christina, along Montgomery Street. Here, the maximum mapped height increases along Wisconsin Avenue to 150 feet and 60 feet along Belmont Buffer Park. This height increase will help with the north-south transition of building heights. This third section is located between Wisconsin Avenue and Belmont Buffer Park and includes the recommended central public open space, which you'll hear about more from Christina, and the transition from the eastern end of the site to Belmont Buffer Park. The maximum mapped height increases on the southern end of the site along Wisconsin Avenue to a maximum of 200 feet and remains 600 feet along Belmont Buffer Park. say, 60 feet. And the grade change from the eastern edge of the site to Belmont Buffer Park aids in this visual transition of building heights, as any new development would be starting from a base that's about 10 to 15 feet lower than the park. Recommended central open space also aids in transition of heights across the sites by creating a spatial pause and midpoint in building heights.

The plan proposed two major public spaces from the Opportunity site, starting with the Civic Ring near South Park Avenue and Wisconsin Avenue. It will provide a large lawn with complementary uses such as a dog run, play areas, and a small-scale court. This private-owned public space would also create a more inviting connection to Belmont Park, which links to the Western Grove Park, as you can see in the map. Near the Civic Green, the plan also proposed to extend the Belmont Park's three-line pedestrian character along Belmont Avenue within the Wisconsin Avenue east side by creating a continuous greenway, a landscape path between Montgomery and Oliver Streets. Central Plaza. The plan proposed a minimum half-acre plaza with shaded and sunny seating areas, social gathering amenities, flexible event space, and strong pedestrian connections to Western Grove Urban Park via landscape transition, showing the map with the dark green dash arrows that manages the changing elevation between the site, as mentioned before by Tyler. This plaza also connects to Wisconsin Avenue, Civic Green, the Belmont Park, and the Brother Parks and Public Space Network. This will likely be a POPs.

Environmental recommendations apply to individual sites. The specific recommendation for this site is to consider installing a microforest in the proposed green space at the north of the Saks parcel at Oliver Street. Microforests are small, densely, and intentionally planted areas that provide a lot of ecological benefits in a compact space. Here, it would provide habitat with connection to the stream across Wisconsin, buffering between the single family homes and new development, and help absorb rainwater and reduce heat.

Now we're going to look at 5550 Friendship Boulevard, which is located on North Park Avenue in the village of Friendship Heights. The plan confirms the existing mapped CR density of 3 FAR and proposes to raise the height to 150 feet, which is the same height proposed everywhere in all the parcels along North Park Avenue.

For urban design, the plan recommends to provide a primary pedestrian entrance on North Park Avenue and also retaining the existing parking and service entrance that is on Friendship Boulevard to locate any vehicle movement away from active pedestrian areas and to design new buildings so that the massing and architectural details respond to the surrounding context of the site as well as its prominent location that has a high visibility from these surrounding uses. And these uses include the Friendship Heights Village Community Center and Hubert Humphrey Park.

At 5550 Friendship Boulevard, the plan proposed an active recreation space at the property corner as shown in the slide. Features could include an open lawn, play equipment, cornhole games, or a small multi-use court. This space would complement Huber Humphrey Park and the proposed Shoemaker Block public space and will be likely a POPs.

Now, similar to 5550, for the Shoemaker block, the plan proposes to confirm the existing map density of a 3FAR, as it's just down the road from that property, and to raise the height to 150 feet. However, the plan also recommends limiting the building height where it meets North Park Avenue to 75 feet, and this is in direct response to community concerns. But wanting a variety of heights along North Park Avenue, particularly along this segment. And just really to particularly lower heights on this block. This is a very low density, low height block now. And we heard a lot of comments about just wanting to maintain the variety of street wall along North Park. The unique feature of this block, which you'll see in the next slide, is that there's a tremendous difference in elevation from North Park to Willard. It's about a 50-foot drop. Shoemaker Farm Lane is quite steep. And so we still have the opportunity to capture the full height of 150 feet along Willard, even if there is a bit of moderation along North Park.

For urban design, the plan recommends that any development along North Park Avenue should be set back from the street to accommodate the open space that Christina will talk about and that it should include one or more public open space seating areas along Shoemaker Farm Lane to serve as a gathering spot and respite for pedestrians walking up the hill, which is very steep. And then also it should leverage the steep topography if any development is providing underground parking. And they should also explore pedestrian connections from North Park Avenue through the site and down to Willard Avenue. In this section, we see how using the steep topography of the site allows for a building to reach the recommended mapped height of 150 along Willard Avenue and be only a few stories taller than a 75-foot tall building along North Park Avenue. And you can see how these proposed heights compare to the existing height of 4620 North Park Avenue, which is represented by the dashed line in the back.

At this site, the plan proposed a neighborhood-scale public space that welcomes the community and supports walking to nearby destinations. The plan envisions a mix of shade and sunny areas, potential interactive art, and clear accessible signage that invites people to enjoy the outdoors along this multifamily corridor. The photo shows the interactive public art with swing benches that welcome all user groups. Ownership here is likely a pops too.

And lastly, we'll look at the former GEICO headquarters site at 5620 Western Avenue. We understand that the board is considering a development application for this site, but this is the sector plan, and so we have long-term recommendations for the full site. The plan proposes extending the existing mapped density of 3 FAR and the mapped height of 100. So right now that extends 100. all along this edge. And the plan is proposing, as we said earlier, to extend that across the full site with the exception of letting a limited portion along Friendship reach 150 feet immediately opposite the Wisconsin Place development, which is around 150 feet, which we'll see in this section. However, again, there is a concern here because this parcel really abuts a series of residential parcels in the Brookdale neighborhood. So the plan, you'll see in a moment, proposes a linear park along this edge. And the plan also proposes, therefore, to limit building heights along the face of that linear park on this edge further. to 45 feet, which is the same height limit that the plan proposed at the edge of the SAC site as it's adjacent to Chevy Chase Village. So sort of taking a similar approach in both of those. At the SAC site, you have the Belmont right-of-way that sort of provides a bit of an extra buffer between the future development and the houses in Chevy Chase Village. Here, the linear park kind of achieves that same role as the right-of-way over there.

For urban design, the plan recommends concentrating the greatest heights at the intersection of Willard and Friendship Boulevard. And that any new development should enhance pedestrian connectivity between Brookdale Neighborhood, Brookdale Neighborhood Park, and the amenities of downtown. That all streets new or existing or recommended should be fronted with active uses. And that with the size of the site, that any phased development should provide interim placemaking strategies as placeholders for the later phases. for this site, and this one is located between Sherrill Avenue and Willard Avenue, the northwest of the site. The left side of the section shows the recommended linear park with 45-foot heights. Fronting onto it in the center is the recommended street, and on the right is Willard Avenue. The yellow gradients between the linear park, recommended street, and Willard Avenue depict how the building heights could transition from one end of the site along Brookdale neighborhood to increase to a potential maximum height of 100 feet as you approach downtown. Cut between Courtland Road and Friendship Boulevard on the southeast portion of the site. And here we're seeing the linear park, a maximum potential height of 45 feet fronting onto it, and then transitioning to a potential maximum of 150 feet along Friendship Boulevard.

At the former Geico site, the plan proposed three main public spaces. They all likely be pubs. The linear park along western edge of the site will create a continuous welcoming connection between Western Avenue and Wheeler Avenue. This linear park should provide a landscape double-tree line path that comfortably serves both pedestrians and bicyclists. It should be wide enough to include at least a 10-foot clear path, along with seating, bike racks, lighting, stormwater treatment opportunities, public art, and wayfinding. Where possible, it could expand to include a dog park, active amenities, events, and stronger entrances from Wheeler and Western Avenue. As a reminder, the plan also recommends conveying the Lees-Brookdale Park to MNCPPC. I also recommend active recreation areas along the linear park. Near Western Avenue, this includes a half acre space with a multi-use court, dog park, shaded seating and other amenities. Additional recreation may be provided through a future expansion of Brookdale Park. The photos show examples of proposed features, a dog park, adaptive swing benches and a multi-use court. ...commands a gateway plaza that welcomes residents, workers, and visitors. Public art, as one of the plaza's main features, could create a clear identity and connect to the linear park and Brookdale Park entrance. Ownership here also would likely be a pops. And to finalize, the bottom right photo shows a water feature, which can be an especially popular amenity for people of all ages.

Recommendations specific to the former Geico site include protecting existing trees where possible particularly in and around Brookdale Park and buffering the existing stream for improved stream health and increased forestation.

Thank you, Hallie, Tyler, and Christina. The final slides of our presentation review the recommendations in the implementation section. The primary recommendation is to create an overlay zone that includes the downtown parcels within the planned area as shown on this map. It would not include Willard Avenue neighborhood park, Brookdale neighborhood park, or any of the Brookdale parcels. The proposed overlay zone will achieve three things for Friendship Heights. Number one, it will allow the plan to tailor the public benefit menu for Friendship Heights by identifying priority public benefits and incentivizing them beyond what the zoning ordinance allows. Second, it will create a mechanism through public benefits that will allow projects to go above their mapped density up to their mapped height where applicable. And third, it would enforce the development standards that address the height transitions to Chevy Chase Village and Brookdale that we just discussed in the site-specific recommendation section. So this section is going to focus on the first two bullet points because we just covered the third one in the previous section. The plan proposes identifying several public benefits as priority public benefits. These benefits would earn more FAR per benefit than what is stated in the zoning ordinance. The priority public benefits identified for Friendship Heights come from the overall categories of housing for all and complete communities from the benefits menu. Some of them are benefits that are already out there and some are sort of redefined or created based on community feedback and identified need. And I do want to stress that this approach and concept really came out of the engagement we did with the community. We know that the public benefits menu was designed to create benefits that would work for all places and then leave open the opportunity for sector plans to personalize, and we've really taken that opportunity to heart in this plan. Many of the benefits in the menu are the things people told us they needed in Friendship Heights in the future, and that's really sort of what led us to this approach. I'm going to go through what those priority benefits are. So the first one are the three benefits listed in the housing for all section exactly as they exist in the zoning ordinance, which is providing more MPDUs than required, providing family size units, and providing units that are more deeply affordable and for a lower percentage of AMI. The next priority benefits come from complete communities in two different subcategories. The first subcategory is the art and placemaking category. The current public benefits menu includes a Tier 4 benefit for providing an arts facility. This is a community amenity that we heard quite a lot about from stakeholders, but the current benefit in the zoning ordinance requires a $20,000 minimum facility, which is a bit larger than we are likely to ever get in Friendship Heights just from a scale perspective. So, therefore, the overlay zone would allow the plan to redefine that benefit, and we've split it here into two, redefining Tier 3 and Tier 4 for this area under art and placemaking. They're the same benefit. Tier 3 is at a 5,000-square-foot level, and the Tier 4 benefit would be the 10,000-square-foot level, both which we think would be impactful in French Apais, respond to community need and community desires, but be at a scale that's more appropriate for this compact downtown. In the neighborhood services and mixed use tier, there is already in the existing menu in the zoning ordinance a benefit for providing a library or a rec center. A library, as I think the board is aware, is one of the most asked for amenities in the engagement feedback that we received across all groups in almost every conversation. The plan proposes, again, to tweak the existing tier four benefit by requiring a facility that is a minimum of 10,000 square feet or perhaps another size at the board's discretion rather than the 20,000 identified in the zoning ordinance. And lastly, the plan proposes a second Tier 4 benefit for this subcategory that's specific to Friendship Heights. As discussed earlier in the presentation, public parking for visitors is a concern, as there is very limited public parking at all. Most visitors to Friendship Heights park in the lot on the former SAC site or at the existing collection retail development. Those lots really serve as the de facto public parking. The Saks Light in particular, it is not restricted by hours as many of the visitor parking are in the medical buildings. And although it costs more than a county lot, you can park there and just leave your care there all day while you go to the doctor, go to Whole Foods, go eat lunch, and do whatever else you're doing. If SACS redevelops, and through this plan we hope that it will encourage that sort of redevelopment, there is a big concern, particularly among the business community and particularly among the medical office employers and employees that we spoke to, that this visitor parking would disappear because there would be new buildings, and if there's parking, it would be for the residents. So given this very unique situation where we just really don't have any public parking the way we do in other downtowns, even though we are encouraging transit and bikes as ways to visit Friendship Heights, given that there is a significant medical office sector here and that they rely on parking for patients because people coming to the doctor sometimes can't use transit for a variety of issues, The sector plan is proposing to create a Tier 4 benefit for providing a minimum of 50 publicly accessible visitor parking spaces in a new development. Recommendation is 50 because that's sort of a sizable amount in one place that could be a new sort of publicly accessible parking for visitors. It would allow people to park once. It would allow them to have access to the doctor for as long as they need, and normally we would hesitate to recommend additional parking like this in an urban area, but in this unique case, we feel it really aligns with the planned goals and the vision. So now that we've defined those priority public benefits, let's understand how they will help projects reach their full potential in Friendship Heights. In the plan area, as we looked at earlier, the proposed zoning will leave many parcels with an FAR of 3 and a height of 150 or 200. For some of the parcels that are medium to small size, 3 FAR is not going to be enough density to reach that height of 150 or higher. So how can these parcels obtain additional density to reach the mapped height? In the recent downtown Silver Spring and Bethesda plans, projects are allowed to make monetary contributions towards infrastructure in the future to obtain additional density, but we don't have those same infrastructure needs. Rather, in Friendship Heights, what we need and what the community members are asking for is more amenities which are already included in the public benefits menu, affordable housing, open space, neighborhood retail, et cetera. So the overlay zone will allow projects to continue to earn density in exchange for providing additional public benefits, and that's what sort of the diagram explains here, that you have the standard method that you start with in any CR project, you have the Public benefits, the density you earn through that, through regular optional method. And then if you want to go above that map density and you still have more room in your envelope because the height is up here, you can continue providing public benefits to earn additional Excel to build density, using that term from the public benefits update. But how are we going to incentivize those benefits? So the priority public benefits are in one category. They are going to be incentivized no matter when a project uses them, whether for the optional method part of the sandwich or above map density. But if projects want to build above that map density, then not just the priority public benefits would be incentivized, but any public benefit from the menu would be incentivized. That's sort of what we're showing here in the diagram. And so to summarize that, the priority ones that I went through step by step, those are always incentivized. The standard public benefits in the menu are only incentivized above the map density up to the mapped height. We've said in many public presentations, I know the board understands, but we'll say it again, Projects cannot go above the mapped height, with the exception of providing more MPDUs per the zoning ordinance already. This system is designed to allow the projects that have a height envelope that goes up to 150 or 200 and not enough density to fill it, to allow them to earn that additional density. And the incentives allow them to earn it faster, because every benefit, you'll get more FAR for each benefit. The math is in the working draft, but overall the benefits are incentivized through a multiplier that's applied to the density identified in the zoning ordinance. Sort of three more things in the overload zone that I want to touch on. The first one is the small sites provision. As part of the recent public benefits update last year, a small sites provision was established to help make redevelopment for small sites near Metro more feasible. And the plan thinks this would be great for Friendship Heights and proposes to tweak the language for the Friendship Heights overlay zone area so that it applies to sites with a track size of under one acre with a total mapped FAR greater than three that are seeking to build above that mapped FAR up to the mapped height. And that since for those sites a more FAR would probably be required because they're small sites, we would – propose that using that small sites provision, it would allow those sites to only start providing public benefits added to FIR. Sort of means it's like standard method up to two and then go above that. But since these sites would likely require more than their three to get all the way up to 150, this gives them a little bit of a boost. The second thing I want to touch on is just the removal of the overlay zones that we identified before. This would, of course, be in the proposed overlay zone. Removing the TDR one from the Geico site because we're changing the underlying zoning to CR, which provides more flexibility and actually more available density than the transfer development rights overlay would. And then again, I talked about the Chevy Chase neighborhood overlay zone, which is over here. This overlay zone really served to mandate ground floor retail facing the street, and it also mandates a grocery store at this site. And as the retail fabric is well established along Wisconsin, the plan is proposing potentially a redesign of this entire block. We're proposing to remove this overlay zone to just provide more flexibility for what happens at this corner of the site in the future. Lastly, to touch on the design review recommendation from the urban design section, the overlay zone proposes to expand the Bethesda design advisory panel, the DAP, to include Friendship Heights. And so that when there are Friendship Heights projects, there would be a Friendship Heights community member that would swap out with a Bethesda community member to review relevant projects. And therefore, just like in other downtowns that have DAPs, all optional method projects in the Friendship Heights Overlay Zone area will be required to achieve the public benefit of Design Excellence Tier 2, and that's following what happened in the public benefits update and how it was applied to the other DAP areas as well. And that brings us to the close of the presentation. Staff requests that the planning board establish the working draft as the Friendship Heights Sector Plan public hearing draft and set a public hearing date. I will add the footnote that since we posted the draft, we found a few minor typos in the text and on one or two figures. And we will correct those for the public hearing draft. And we will also be adding some additional support material, particularly to the engagement appendix and the transportation appendix, as Fernanda mentioned. But thank you very much, and we really look forward to your comments.

Well, great. Thank you so much. On the date set, are we still – I think we're still – Have we set, is it still September 10th?

The staff report asks for it to be held in two parts, September 10th at the board and September 14th in the community.

Okay, great, great. Thank you so much. So this is my first comment. This is really wonderful. It's very apparent about the... engagement that went into this and and the and using that to with you and the community developing a vision and goals for for Friendship Heights you know the overarching goals and then as you went through each section the goals for each each section like transportation it's historic preservation schools and things like that and so this is I really appreciate the hard work you know it takes years to make this happen and I'm really excited about this plan and The key is, how do we really get it implemented? You can have all these goals, and how do we? And I like how you have a couple of the opportunity sites, because this plan does not have any governmental land there that the government can help jumpstart it. But it's really important that we work with these opportunity sites, these developers and landowners, to see if we can help them jumpstart a lot of this. I'll set the stage there. By waiting until the end, we have a lot of pent-up comments, and I was wondering how we really do that. I don't know. Maybe we have each board member just talk through. I don't think you can answer all these, but at least make sure that when you come back, during the work sessions, that a lot of these These comments are addressed, but this is my recommendation. I wonder what the other board members think, but there are lots you went through and some thoughts here. So we can maybe big picture think about our thoughts, but maybe go through if you have board members like on slide this and this, and when you come back, make sure this, or just like that. So that's what I'm thinking, but I'd like to hear from my fellow board members.

I have a few comments. Thank you for your presentation. I really enjoyed how well planned you all were and how coordinated you were in your presentation. So you guys did an outstanding job. So my questions are really simple. And they go back to slide 20 and to also slide 115. And it basically deals with the height, especially along Wisconsin Avenue. My initial question after seeing slide 20 was, why are there height limitations of only 200 feet? And then in or around slide 115, you talked about incentivizing height density. When I look at the development along Wisconsin Avenue, I know further up, heading north on Wisconsin Avenue, there was a project where they started out at, I think, 200 feet, and then they came back for an amendment to go up to 300 feet. Why are we only at 200 feet here? Is that a zoning restriction? Because I can envision that area of... You know, Montgomery County being like a megalopolis for the international city of Washington, D.C., and it's a unique opportunity to build something really grand.

Sure. So as we've talked about a few times here, French Bites is a very compact downtown. It has the density, but it only has one block deep of it before you get to the neighborhood. In addition, it's across the street immediately from Washington, DC. And as we know, the height limit across the street is 130. And it probably isn't going anywhere in our lifetimes. So keeping in mind that we are immediately surrounded within one block deep from that metro of residential neighborhoods that have a high limit of 35, and across the street, the DC fabric, which is similarly mixed use and similarly dense, but is only going to go up to 100, 130 feet in the future. Going to 300 felt like that would be a real challenge to transition to those adjacent areas. Downtown Bethesda is great because it's so much bigger. It has a lot more blocks to start transitioning between the Wisconsin core out to the edges, which it does very nicely. Here we have only a tiny fraction of that space. So it was really balancing the desire to maximize development at the metro with thinking about the context. I mean, we don't plan in a vacuum, so we're planning this, keeping in mind the fact that we have to transition heights from Wisconsin down to the neighborhood, even going from 200 to 35. We think we've figured out how to get there, but looking at 300 seemed sort of out of scale for this downtown.

Vice Chair Linden, you have a question?

Commissioner Hedrick? Oh, just a couple, just a real couple of comments. I thought the housing section was really good, so I don't have too many comments there other than I appreciate the truing up of the C and the R on the FAR for that. I appreciate that to allow the flexibility. I also, similar concerns a little bit about the about the restrictions, but not a ton given the difference in the pre-existing era. Could you jump to slide 25 real quick? And so with the priority public benefit area for this plan, do we have an idea of what we're getting out of that? that we're not getting otherwise with our MBDU program because it's only up to 65 with AMI. Is there any significant benefits for that for access to state funds or anything like that for identifying it as a higher republic benefit area?

So what we said here is actually that this connects to the implementation section. It's saying that the benefit we already have in the menu in the zoning ordinance of deeply affordable units, there are three or four tiers within that benefit, and each one earns a certain amount of FAR. So by saying it's a priority public benefit, In Friendship Heights, the plan is actually proposing to give you twice that FAR if you want to do it. So it's trying to provide an incentive with a tool that we have control over, FAR, to say, well, here, we really want those. We want more MPDUs. We have, I think as Bobna mentioned, Very little affordable housing here at all because most of the stuff was built before that. Prior to the MDQL. So that's a real challenge. It's so far behind other downtowns in terms of giving that variety of housing. So that's what being a priority public benefit means.

God knows. Linking it to the implementation and to the priority public benefits. Is there any reason for 65 versus 60 or that link? Because most of the programs are linked to 60, but I'm just curious about that.

I would love Bob to answer this.

I'm sorry. I'm dragging you up from the thing.

The 65% comes from the incentive zoning guidelines, and so that's matching what we call as deeper levels of affordability, because as we know that MPGUs are between 65% and 70%. Okay, great.

Just making sure. All right. No, and anything, no, otherwise I just have a few comments on the transportation section. There was, with the right-of-way, I think it was on slide 54. There were several of these in a row, between 54 and 58. Will there be suggestions or recommendations in the draft plan for possibilities of creating the streetscapes here without accessing the additional right-of-way? Because the additional right-of-way comes sort of with the development piece. The development piece comes in, and that might be piecemeal, and we might have one on this block and not to the next and not on the next. And so creating the full 122 foot right of way set up like that along the entirety of Wisconsin and French Bites Boulevard and River Road might be difficult without options for interim conditions and things like that to include the transit lanes, the additional bike lanes, et cetera.

Yeah, so for Wisconsin Avenue, because the landowner owns everything from western up to the edge of the plan boundary, we strategically focused on making changes on the east side of Wisconsin because that seemed more likely to happen within the lifespan of the plan.

OK, and for the other streets, as well as there are options for interim conditions on River or Friendship Boulevard, I think there was less expansion on the right-of-way, but I was just curious.

Yes, so I guess we can go to the next slide.

These were also the typical presentation. In the working draft, you can see all the interim and ultimates and that stuff.

Yeah, so like for example here, like the proposed cross-section, a lot of the changes are focused on the west side. That's adjacent to the Geico property because, you know, that's more likely to develop. So we kind of took that approach with the cross-sections here.

Okay, great. No, I just was curious. And then the other question is with cross-section for Friendship Boulevard, I think it was 58. I can read my own handwriting. How does that connect to the D.C. side? What does the cross-section look like as you go down into the D.C.?

Yeah, particularly with, like, the bike lanes, it pretty much aligns with currently what D.C. Well, with D.C.'s plans for bike lanes. Okay. They have bike lanes on the other side, which is Jennifer Street, but they also have plans to, like, upgrade them, so it actually connects well with what they're doing.

Okay, so it connects well over the jurisdictional line to make sure that we're coordinating and everything like that.

Yes.

Great, thank you. No, other than that, that was just a few questions to clarify, but thank you very much. I appreciate it. I'm good. Yeah.

Vice Chair Lunden, do you want to go over your questions or comments?

Yeah, so I have a few. So I'm going to try to organize my questions into a few, I guess, categories. And I don't want to take up kind of, if others have questions, like as I'm going through this, I don't want to just roll through many minutes of me talking only, but Just to get things started, I had a couple of questions on the open space, Civic Green, two of them in particular. Civic Green on Wisconsin and the Shoemaker block. So I guess because, yeah, thanks. So starting on Wisconsin. We've talked about this a little bit in the context of actual development applications, whether we should place kind of active spaces, play spaces, gathering spaces kind of directly adjacent to high volume roadways. And it sounds like we're envisioning the Civic Green to be multiple things, which is great. But we are showing it here illustratively as being right next to an arterial. We're also, of course, expecting that arterial to hopefully change with fewer lanes for cars, a transit lane, more buffer on the east side with the bike lanes, as you were talking about before. But were there other options considered? Because I do think that there could be other opportunities to have these kinds of spaces a little bit separated from high volume roadways. And that's for a lot of reasons. there's obviously the safety component, but aside from that, there's just kind of the public health component of direct exposure. There's the noise that comes out of these roadways that makes it less comfortable. And if we really do want it to be a well-used space and used in the ways that you're describing, my suspicion, you know, just based on other spaces like this in comparable areas, is that this may not be a super comfortable space for a lot of people. So I'm just curious if you'd considered other places for that, or at least kind of led with the principle that we want a little bit more separation from high volume roadways with these kinds of open spaces, and then maybe leave it up to future applicants to determine how to make it fit, where it goes, but kind of having that principle that guides it.

And so the civic green, like when we put a place for a specific public open space in a sector plan process, it's not necessarily determine the design. The location of the civic green, as we recommend, is to make it visible. One big challenge that Wisconsin Avenue has is that a lot of these sort of smaller plazas that are more typical of a mixed-use development, they are not necessarily visible. And this side, the east side of Wisconsin, they lack active recreation. So if the small court or the dog park, when we arrive at the design stage, of the public open space. We're going to be discussing that. The sector plan is just established. We want to make sure that we have a presence, that this civic ring is visible. So as people are walking or driving or biking through Wisconsin Avenue, it can be identifiable. And also in terms of the visual, because the We are trying to connect all the network of parks and public spaces. The most popular public open space is along South Park Avenue in front of the village center where Atara is showing there. So having the possibility to have this sort of viewpoint to a main public space will help integrating, you know, people are using one space for social gathering, they can merge to another one to be physically active versus, you know, the other one. And it allows to have an identity of the space. So in the end of the day, when the developer comes with a proposal, The civic ring can be inside a gateway. It can be at the corner. It can be a little bit away. So our language is put it along South Park Avenue, near. at the corner or near to have that flexibility. So I think that details like that will be discussed further outside of the sector plan.

Okay. That makes sense. Sorry, go ahead.

I was going to add one more thing that Christina mentioned in her talking points, but just to explain here. Today, we don't have a picture of it in here, but it is in the plan. This park that's along, there's actually a wall that separates Chef Chase Village from this development and the only connection is here. And the plan is proposing to make this part of Belmont, you know, two-sided street, but actually because of the topography, we won't be able to sort of take down the wall. Here it's actually holding up the land of Chevy Chase Village on that side. And so it's in all likelihood that, you know, this might become more porous, but this connection is probably still going to remain and wanting to sort of make a better connection between the downtown and the neighborhood, despite the topography, despite the other challenges. So, yes, I think it's less important for us that it's on Wisconsin. It's about the visibility and also the consolidated aspect of it, that we don't get lots of tiny spaces, but we get an actual significant space, and that it connects to this existing connection to this other park in the village, trying to establish a connective network here where we don't have any through-vehicle streets, where we have a topography change, where we have all these other sort of, like, challenges and connections.

I totally get that putting the puzzle together in a way that tries to check all those boxes is tricky. It sounds like visibility has been a big priority. I would just offer a few counterexamples to prioritizing that, maybe the expense of other things. If you look at downtown Silver Spring right now, on the corner of Colesville and Wayne going north from the metro, there's that large open space that was likely done a few years ago, maybe in connection with development. I can't remember exactly the history there. Highly visible, right? It has a lot of nice design, and it is very underutilized. Almost no one uses it, right? Similarly, on the corner of Georgia and Wayne, there's that kind of urban civic plaza that's right there. Highly visible intersection that gets a lot of pedestrian traffic, too, and almost no one uses it. day in, day out, and I think there are reasons for this. There are common reasons for this. Visibility is important. Visibility can also be solved through good wayfinding. I think if you go to a lot of well-used spaces in different urban environments, they're not always directly, in fact, they're often not directly abutting a high-volume street, and there's other ways that people find it, access it, and it can often make for a more comfortable place to be. So I guess what I'm getting at is I hope that I want to focus on this a little bit more in the work sessions, and I hope that we can, in future planning exercises, kind of like think about the function of the space and who's going to use it and why they would choose to use it that way and kind of what are the considerations at play. Visibility is important, obviously. Access is hugely important, and connectivity is important. but we want people to be there, right? And so that's something that just kind of always comes up when I see these examples alongside a big, busy, loud road, right? So the other one I just want to talk about briefly, the Shoemaker block. A little, you know, similar example, although Park Avenue is a very quiet street, so it's less that, and actually I'm going to, my question's more about sort of This is an example where we recommend pulling the building back from the street. And I wonder if there's an opportunity to maybe flip that so we still have the building facing the street for a good urban pedestrian experience and maybe put the space, this internal plaza, surrounded by a potential future building.

We studied that. Actually, it was one of the first things that we thought of. The topo, when we go on the tour, everyone can experience the topo of this particular block. It is extremely challenging.

Is this the one that goes down a lot? It goes straight down.

And so creating any, we are, of course, the previous plan recommended an open space here. But we were less, maybe not focused on accessibility in 98 the way we are focused on making sure our open spaces are accessible in the technical sense of the word. Our thought was that North Park is a very quiet street, but it has a lot of pedestrian activity, and there's not a lot of places to sit while you're walking that are available to you that are not behind a building or in a private courtyard. And so the goal for usable open space that wasn't going to be topographically challenged, challenging from an accessibility perspective, we first looked at sort of a courtyard-type condition, but determined that that wasn't going to truly feel publicly accessible, and how would you even get to it? There was no way to access it in an accessible way with even... not that we did a thorough design study, but it's a really tough site. So it became a question of do we, the open space on North Park or Willard, and looking at the conditions of those streets and the way they function in the neighborhood, North Park seemed like a better fit. We're sort of looking at it as, yes, it will pull the building back, but it's not going to be a very big space. It can be the minimum required per the code, and it really would be more like almost like a front court in a way, where with public seating, which is something that there's a lack of along all of North Park. But it's just a very challenging site. We studied a lot of spaces, a lot of ways to work the open space here.

Yeah, thanks for reminding me about that context. That makes a lot of sense. And yeah, difficult to overcome the natural features of a place sometimes. So 100%, that makes sense.

Can I just say one thing as you're talking about these parks? I know in some areas you designate a minimum size in some areas. So I think is there a way in some places you may need a minimum size, but there's some ways that also talk about the function you want there that may help signal to the owner or developers or whatever. You're not talking about X, but you're talking about Y. So whether it's 0.2 acres, one acre, whatever. But it's the goal of the function of what you want there. And then also about some of these public spaces in the past, I agree that some of them were very hard to get to. And they were mostly hardscape. Now I think I see a lot of the public plazas or whatever, there is a combination of hardscape I think they're more inviting. But I agree. Like the one in New Hampshire, Georgia, and Wayne, that's really all the hardscape piece. And today, probably we need a buffer before the, you know, because it's so, I think the design has evolved more, but I do appreciate your, you don't want it in a high traffic area whenever, but maybe a buffer, if it has to be near a high, maybe there's a buffer before you get to it. But I understand that we're trying to, yeah, I'll leave it with that, okay.

I'm going to save, I think, what may be the somewhat thornier comments for the end. So I'll just quickly get to a couple of environmental comments. The first is I would really, when we get to the work sessions, I would love us to include as an additional goal not just climate resiliency but climate mitigation. or greenhouse gas mitigation. It's inherent to these types of plans and these planning principles. I just don't want it to get lost in the wash. I want us to kind of reinforce the idea that this type of development is inherently more climate friendly because it's on a per capita level. People just are more energy efficient living in these environments. Um, so I, I, I think that I know that that's not a controversial thing to, to say. I just, I just want us to kind of continue to elevate that in our documents too. Um, and let's see. Um, so the height transitions, can, can you, so first, uh, there were a few examples, let's just focusing on Wisconsin first, kind of going North to South. It seemed like um the difference between what the zoning the zoning plane was and the recommended plane was a little bit higher on the north end and a little bit smaller on the south end just the difference for when it meets kind of the the neighborhood um but can you kind of what practically like what is that what's that difference in terms of height do we do we know i mean we can sort of see a version of it on the screen here but what's the actual footage difference

in terms of the compatibility from the zoning ordinance versus what we're proposing here. And there's language that explains the difference in the draft, which we didn't bring here because it's really getting into the weeds. We're taking the same 45-degree angle. We're just starting it from the building phase. And we had an extensive coordination effort with... Chevy Chase Village, and the property owner to talk about, can we take down the wall? What does a two-sided street on Belmont look like, feel like? What's feasible there? And the site is deep enough that the way we've represented here, it could be two different buildings facing two different sides. It's deep enough for that. And so there's the goal of having a frontage that feels residential that it's not a back along Belmont that was a big concern of all of ours that if we are going to change the orientation there right now the orientation is like this right so we wanted I think you know it's a it's a would be a goal of most of our plans right to try and change orientation so that we have two-sided streets we have connectivity we have things facing each other we're creating that urban room on you know on every block to the extent that we can so that meant that we needed to think about what's a two-sided street over here, but what's a two-sided street in Wisconsin, and how do we go from one to the other across one block depth? And so the difference in height is not that great. You can see you'd still have to – you'd go up maybe another floor and a half before you'd hit the zoning – There's only compatibility that you'd hit anyway for being across the street from an R-60. So it's slightly more conservative than the current compatibility, but not significantly.

There's one other, if I can interject. Elsa Heisenquist, Chief, West County Planning for the Record. Something that I think our presentation may not have highlighted enough is that the Belmont Buffer Park is a wonderful space. It is a great space that goes from Western Grove Urban Park along the edge. And it's very inviting. People walk on their dogs. And I think one of the things that we're looking at here And it's in the text of the plan, and you can see it in the diagram, is to extend that green space along Belmont Avenue, around the corner to Oliver Street, not with the same depth. I think the language on the plan is wide enough for a double row of trees. But I think you're getting, can you go to the section, Atara? Yes. So for that, the one before, so for that one, you have the building set back a little bit so that you have just a little bit more of an extension of an opportunity to extend that promenade. So you're looking at maybe 15, 20 feet, so one or two stories difference. But what you gain is sort of that green connection that you might lose otherwise.

So to that point, though, we're introducing the idea of a green buffer. we're introducing a double planted row of trees, not a single, but a double. We have the lower height and the suggestion or maybe the requirement that it's facing Belmont with a residential kind of look. That's a lot of things. That feels like a lot of things relative to other plans that we've done. And I'm just like, why are we choosing to go so over and above with this particular site, considering what you said, that it's not a huge height difference, another floor and a half maybe. I mean, I guess you can sort of, depends on how it's going to be designed and so on. But I guess what I'm getting at is my concern is that we're losing a combination of flexibility and potential units. And it is a narrow site, so it's a little bit more constrained than some. And I'm just wondering kind of what we're getting, what we're actually getting from it, and what is the main motivation?

So I think this is an opportunity for us to provide some more detailed information to the board. And so I guess I would suggest tabling the conversation. I think we've written into the plan what the intent is. I think how it manifests, I think that's something that we would want to come back in the work sessions to address.

Well, that's fine. That's fine. We can do it in the work session. I'm just sort of airing kind of the concern at this point. There is language about the intent, but we talk about compatibility, the intent of compatibility in other plans, too. And I guess what I'm getting at is we're going further. My impression is we're going further with this overlay recommendation.

It's slightly different in that in our other sort of CBD plans, we don't have new development right across the street from single families. There's usually a block difference. In Fenton Village, you know, on Grove Street, you know, you had sort of that proximity, but then it's like sides to, you know, fronts to sides. So I think this is a bit of a unique. I don't think it's the same as others, and that's, I think, why you're seeing what you're seeing. But I think we totally hear you. We're glad you're bringing it up. And we'll be prepared in the fall.

OK. Yeah, that sounds great. Can I just say a similar comment in that when you come back, could you show us, if you didn't have that, is there some sort of, we talked about, Rendering, what does that feel like if you did it in accordance with our current zoning? And what do you lose in terms of FAR by doing what's currently in the code? And then also a question, I know that a similar situation, and just you can help us understand what we did then. Remember back here, HOC's property? They had a high, I think it's just right down the street, we approved. The HOC property was a high rise. And across the back street, there was a residential street with homes on it. And to me, it was a similar situation. I don't know. did we have a different sort of look at it than? If I can go, I'll go back to the, it was just.

I think you're referring to Wheaton Gateway. Yeah, so this is all really helpful for us to be able to prepare for the work sessions. And also, there'll be opportunity between now and then for you to hear from the community and from other stakeholders. And visit the site. And visit the site, so we'll have a better sense and be able to get into the nitty-gritty of all of this. But this is helpful for us to know.

No worries.

Thank you.

Okay. I just have one more, and I promise I'm done after that. So I think after preliminary recommendations, which is when we first heard about the parking recommendation for public parking as part of a future mixed-use or some sort of development, I think I raised at the time, like had we done a parking, was there data, not just kind of what we're hearing from community, but have we done a parking study? You know, did we understand current utilization? I understand there's like, there's private lots, but there's also the SAC site, which is, as you mentioned, a de facto like parking site for folks. So as we move into the work sessions, I would love if there could be just a little bit more, well, if there hasn't been that kind of study to this point, Is it possible that we could do a little bit more of a study to understand utilization, turnover, and particularly on the SAC site? Because this is a very anecdotal version of what I'm describing. But if you go on Google Street View, it goes back 15 years. If you click through each of those years, the parking on the SAC site is nearly empty for most of them. And I understand that's like a point in time It's not throughout the day. So I'm kind of interested in ground-truthing the concern that we're hearing. Because we hear that concern all the time. We hear the concern from businesses, like, oh, what's going to happen if we repurpose the lane? What's going to happen if we put in a bike lane where people are going to park and visit? And it's one thing to have the concern. And I understand the business concern. But it's another thing to have the actual data and understanding how people are using it throughout the day at peak periods, where they're going. If they park here, do they go there? Where are the locations? and where are they going because of that. I don't want this sense of inertia from what we're hearing to take over, and all of a sudden it's in the priority benefits. Because that's another thing. If we're going to prioritize it in terms of benefits for more FAR, I think we really need the evidence. We really need the data to back that up. I don't think it's enough to just say, some businesses told us that they're worried about where people are going to park. I don't think that's sufficient to get it to the public benefit stage, at least. So I'm interested, during the work sessions, if we can have just a little bit more data about that.

Yeah, I mean, I'll see what we can do. With the public garages, you have very specific data. This is all private. But I think we've received the charge, and we will do our best to meet your expectations. I can't guarantee it's going to be exactly what you want, but I think we'll do our best.

I also want to note, which we didn't get into and we can look at, is how many – there are a handful of MCDOT-controlled spaces on roads where we are proposing major changes. And I think we will be losing some of the actual public parking that we have because of now dedicated transit lanes, bike lanes, which we're fully in support of going that direction, but we probably should do a tally. We have 130. something street spaces if we're losing actual, you know, MCGOT's concerns about they are supporting all these recommendations at the same time acknowledging that they only have 100 spaces and we're going to lose some of those that they feel that, you know, it's in our conversations with them that it's important to, you know, as a general public benefit to not make you go into a private garage and get out after an hour and pay $15 or whatever. So, you know, that that is, we can look at that. That's easy to figure out that. I think we can look at the really large lots and see, like Elsa said, a lot of these private lots with a handful of visitor spaces and these private buildings, we haven't been able to get any data. During existing conditions, we did try. So we can figure out how to do that to the best of our abilities with the data that we have.

Yeah, that would be great. And I understand it may not be possible to do something super robust. But we need something, especially if it's going to make it to the priority public benefit stage of things. And I think related to that, I think we need a little bit of clarity that if it does remain in the public benefit package of things for the FAR boost, is it sufficient to get one of those, right? One $150 spot within one development or does it continue after the first go? And I think that harkens back to like, what is our initial analysis of the need? So we really need to ground it in that. Otherwise it feels like we're a little bit kind of without a compass. We're great. Thank you. Sorry. The, those were all the plan is the working draft. It really is great. And so thank you all for the hard work. Um, it's easy to kind of focus on the things that stand out as like things to, to, to focus on for the work sessions. But, um, yes, thank you so much for your hard work on this. It really is largely in good shape, I think. And, um, clearly reflects everything you've heard the community. And I think that's important that, um, This is grounded in extensive conversations, as you've talked about before. And I definitely don't want that to get lost. So thank you all so much.

Just a couple of comments, additional comments. So now when we talk about schools, it's obvious here you don't need a new school. But would it be helpful as we move forward to talk about what are the maybe because this is talking about capital improvements for the long term. So it'd be good to talk, when we're talking to MCPS, about if that school is an aging school there. Is this the point to talk to say, well, maybe that school needs, it doesn't need a new school, but it may be to the point where it needs a lot of upgrades so that MCPS could It's part of the master plan for that. It's not a new school, but it needs a lot of work to get it to make it viable for the next 25 years. I don't know, but maybe they don't need something like that mentioned in our master plan to help them advocate for. But I'm just saying as a question, should we think about that? A question. You don't have to answer now if you don't want to. But it's more of, should that be part of our master plan too? Even though you don't need to do school, but oh man, this one's about the, you know, it needs half a million dollars, $2 million in repairs to keep it going.

We can definitely coordinate with MCPS on that. The one difficulty is none of the schools are within the plan area. Okay. So this, yeah. And the two elementary schools that are closest to the plan area have received significant capital improvements. Okay.

Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you for acknowledging that. Also, we talk about the real estate market. I'm a little... And in these master plans, we set expectations. And I know a lot of places, we know we have 200 feet, 250 feet, whatever. And what is the likelihood that over the next 10 to 15 years that economics would be right to even go to 150 feet, to 200 feet? And we always talk about incentives for maybe for affordable housing, but are there any incentives even needed to even make the market rate build out on these properties? And so I'm just saying, how do we talk about expectation? I don't know. Maybe it's in the incentive section, but did we, RCO, go do any analysis. Can the market rate developments move forward, even at the heights and at the density? Can the developers even get to the density? Will the economics even work to get to what we put out there? Yeah. That's a question. I don't know if you thought through that. Or maybe you can come back. And a couple other things. The opportunity, as I said before, it's great that you have these opportunity sites. I think that's what's going to really jumpstart the Geico, we see that's kind of on its, but some of these others we talked about and how do we make sure that those can have the right Setting to move forward, but this is as everyone said this is a wonderful project planned and I just you know we see what what can we do especially in implementation to make sure it moves forward because we're setting expectations now with the community you know getting them jazzed about you know they want things to happen we want how do we and

put our best foot forward to make some of those things happen.

And what I didn't see here, which I just question, sometimes in the master plans, we say how much capacity there will be if it was all built out. And sometimes that sets the wrong expectations, too, because it's sort of hard. And so if there is somewhere hidden somewhere, I just want to make sure the likelihood that only 25% of this will happen over there, or 50%. because sometimes it comes back to bite us when the community sees, oh, there's 10,000 or 15,000 more units capacity, but generally that likely will never happen, especially in a plant like that. So all good. Thank you. We look forward to coming back for work sessions. I don't know if there are any other questions or comments. Please.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Well, no, we were not going to let this hard work go on. Yeah, so is there a motion to approve the Friendship Heights Sector Plan Working Draft as a public hearing draft and set a public hearing date? I think it's around September 10th or whatever it The 10th and the 14th. 10th and the 14th. So two-parter.

Two-parter. I'll move to approve this plan as the working draft with the public hearings date of September 10th and 14th. Second.

All in favor? Aye. Aye. The ayes have it. Thank you. Wonderful presentation. Thank you to all the team that was here today and all that helped put it together. Thank you. And we're going to go for lunch now, take a lunch break and come back at, what did we say? What should we do? About... Yeah, I want to do 215. Give us a little bit more time. All right, 215. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. We're starting our afternoon session. We're on item number nine, zoning text amendment 2609, rule village overlay zone, vehicle repair, limited use, where staff is recommending that the planning board transmit comments to the district councils supporting the ZTA with the amendments. And this afternoon, we have Ben Burbitt with the planning department presenting this item.

Thank you, Chair Harris, and good afternoon, members of the Planning Board. For the record, I am Benjamin Verbert with the Design, Placemaking, and Policy team. And as was introduced, I will be presenting staff's recommendations to the board on ZTA 2609. Staff is recommending the board transmit comments to the District Council supporting this zoning text amendment with some amendments, which we will discuss throughout the course of this presentation. Brief overview, this was introduced June 16, 2026 by Council Vice President Balcom and was co-sponsored by Council Members Lutke and Sayles. And there is an upcoming public hearing. This is a typo. It's actually next Tuesday. We're gonna, I'm gonna spend a little bit of time going over what and where and why rural village overlay zone, because this is kind of a unique one that we don't have a lot of in the county. This first arrived as part of the 2002 Potomac sub-region master plan, and it established the kind of commercial core of Darnestown as a rural village overlay zone, kind of shown on the western part of the county, just to the west of Gaithersburg. And then in 2006, the Damascus Master Plan added three more villages to the rural village overlay zone, including Brownsville, Purdom, and Etcheson, located on either side of Damascus up at the upper part of the county. Within that rural village overlay zone, there are a lot of different standards that sort of limit land uses, require additional setbacks, and other things. This ZTA in particular is looking to take the repair uses defined as major and minor and add them as a limited use. Currently, they are allowed as conditional use just so we can establish what repair major and repair minor are. Repair major is where general vehicle repair and services are conducted. This includes engine and transmission replacement or rebuild, body, and paint shops, so kind of your larger externality-type repair uses. RepairMiner is a vehicle repair service that includes smaller things like focusing on audio and alarm installations, customized accessories like glass tenting, quick lubrication facilities, scratch and dent repair, bed liner installations, tire brakes, mufflers, auto glass, or anything sort of that's not major engine work. Both of these definitions specifically do not include repair for commercial or fleet vehicles. This is more for personal auto use. As I mentioned, the repair major and repair minor are allowed as conditional uses in the rural village overlay zone, but that was added in 2021 through ZTA 2105. Prior to that time, the repair uses were not allowed in the rural village overlay zone at all. In 2021, the Planning Board did support adding these as conditional uses. If you really look at the intent of the Rural Abilidurville Zone, it is to provide necessary services for people who live in the rural parts of the county. And a necessary service for people who live in rural parts of the county is a place to get your vehicle repaired. And so the logic went that the board supported that there should be at least some process to allow those uses in these areas. And that process that was chosen at the time was a conditional use process. The other thing worth discussing in here, and that gets into what the ZTA is proposing to do, is it's modifying setbacks. And there are two different types of setbacks that we are discussing. The first section of the ZTA is modifying what are the use setbacks that were established in the use section of the code. And so an auto repair major anywhere in the county, regardless of where it is, currently would have a 100-foot setback from a residential lot. What the ZTA is doing in its recommendation is saying, in this overlay zone, that can be reduced to 50 feet. And it is also making a recommendation that it only apply to new buildings and that if there's an existing building that the use moves into, it would be allowed to do that without adhering to that setback. The other setback changes that are being proposed by the ZTA are actually because of the overlay zone itself. Some of the changes are really about getting the language to match how we do this in other sections of code, clarifying that in an agricultural, rural, residential, or residential zone that is vacant or improved with agricultural or residential uses, Different setbacks might apply. It's very wordy, but it's how we handle this in the more standard form. The other change that's happening specific to this overlay zone are these setback changes that have to do with split zone properties. This is sort of an unfortunate complication. The rural village overlay zone has lots of split zone properties within it. That's not something that's terribly common in most of the county. However, in the rural village overlay zone, most of the properties that have a commercial residential zoning component to them also have a residential zoning component. This appears to have been done as part of creating sort of a buffer or a compatibility around the commercial uses, sort of forcing automatically larger setbacks and more green space around those commercial uses. The reality is, though, is it creates split-zone properties. And part of what the overlay zone is trying to acknowledge is when you are a commercial residential zone property adjacent to a residential zone property, It currently says you're supposed to use the setbacks that would apply to the residential zone. The ZTA is recommending that this doesn't apply if the neighboring property is split zoned because there's an interpretation question that has been unanswered about whether or not having a skinny buffer in the front or back of the property that is residential would constitute a residential zone property. So this is just trying to say, no, it's commercial. We're not going to apply split zone properties to these standards. The final change the ZTA is making is around the requirement for shade around parking facilities. Currently, the overlay zone requires that 30% of the parking facility be covered in shade after the presumed canopy coverage from 25 years of tree growth. The ZTA is adding language that you can also use alternative structures or cool pavement to apply to 30% of the parking facility. This gets into some of staff's recommendations. The first gets back to those setbacks that are required by the use itself. In this case, the 100-foot setback required for major vehicle repair. Staff is not supporting sort of a blanket reduction from 100 feet to 50 feet. As staff, I think the location matters. I think the surrounding situation matters. Because we've already amended the ZTA to only apply to new buildings, we're basically recommending that then a site plan, if there is a new building, would be the vehicle to determine whether or not you could reduce the setbacks for the use. In addition to that, it's sort of a – and that has created a much longer section because we're also adding the fact that To qualify for this exemption the board needs to sort of find that there's a compatibility with Existing uses and find that those reduced setbacks meet the intent of the overlay zone So again this sort of clause that we're recommending adding I think gets at the the same concern that that's being raised and sort of does it in a way that allows the board to make that final determination and Maybe it's not 50 feet. Maybe it's 70 feet or whatever the board feels necessary and The other recommendation is that the planning staff is not supporting the alternative shade structure or cool design in lieu of planting trees. And this is for a few reasons. One, the overlay zone has sort of gone out of its way to specify the 30% shade coverage. In most other instances, 25% is the countywide standard for shading parking facilities. And when you really get at the purpose of the overlay zone, part of it is drawing upon the open green character of the surrounding area, which is trees, I think, do a better job of that than cool pavement or an alternative shade structure. And the third reason is the climate assessment that was transmitted, which we'll talk about right after this, also does not recommend doing this, in part because trees not only provide shade, but they provide wildlife and habitat. They assist in stormwater management and control and have other co-benefits that some of these physical structures do not have. And just a final recommendation planning staff is making to the ZTA, there is a section that is technically changing the section reference about where there's a thing that allows certain uses to not require plat, and it's part of Chapter 50. The section reference was outdated. It was pointing to an old reference from an old Chapter 50. Rather than updating it, the ZTA is just proposing saying Chapter 50. Staff wants to put the new section reference back. This is a very particular reference. exemption that I would imagine most users are not aware of. And it actually is kind of important for use of this overlay zone. And so we just felt it was better to put the full section reference back in. As said before, there was a climate assessment that was done for this Zoning Tax Amendment and was transmitted by planning staff to the district council last week. It found a combination of positive and negative impacts. As with a lot of these, the scale of how many of these happen and where exactly they happen really is going to determine whether this is a positive or negative. Sort of the biggest positive is that if we are allowing and making it easier for these repair uses to be in the rural village overlay zones It may help sort of intercept some vehicle trips that would have taken a much longer path Back into more developed parts of the county to have these sort of services done Most of the negative impacts that found were around this idea of the shade structures or alternative shading which is why the recommendation was to not proceed with that and So that concludes my presentation. This is not the cleanest zoning text amendment we've ever worked on, both as it came to us and as we're recommending changes to it. So, you know, I open this up to questions from the board.

Thank you, Mr. Burbitt. We have one person to provide public testimony. It's Casey Cerner representing Monica and Francisco Costa. And you have six minutes, please.

Good afternoon. For the record, Casey Cerner with Miles and Stockbridge on behalf of Wilneke Auto Repair. And with me this afternoon is Monica Costa, who's in the audience. Wilneke is a small family-owned auto repair shop that's operated in the county for 24 years, currently operates in the rural village overlay zone in Darnestown. But I am here today on behalf of Wilneek to urge the planning board to provide a favorable recommendation to the council on the ZTA and also to add some additional suggested amendments that build on what staff is recommending through their thorough analysis. And I commend staff's report and the ease by which that they have explained this zoning text amendment, because it does get a little when you overlay the multiple requirements on top of each other. But in general, this ZTA is beneficial because it allows for vehicle repair, major and minor, as a limited use rather than a conditional use in the rural village overlay zone. This provides economic development in the sense that it removes a zoning hurdle that is really a financial barrier for small businesses, especially small auto businesses, to break the barrier and start operating in the rural village overlay zone. It also advances public policy by expanding these services into the more rural, auto-dominated areas where folks rely on their vehicles more than, say, the urban locations within the county. But for Will Neek, it means the continued operation of the business. This will remove the zoning hurdle that's currently preventing issuance of permits by DPS and, barring any surprises, hopefully resolve outstanding issues with DPS. With respect to the setbacks, and Mr. Burbitt characterized these as the use setbacks, and there are certain amendments that staff has recommended on page seven of the staff report. And we would suggest to add the phrase vehicle storage after the phrase parking facilities in those use setback amendments. And that is articulated in writing In the letter that I submitted on July 13th into the record This is suggested to align with the language of the use standards in the zoning ordinance for auto repair major and minor And the purpose is to just provide clarity at building permit to avoid any interpretational issues I also suggest that The alternative parking facility shading structures be supported by the planning board as introduced in the ZTA. We understand the positive impacts of trees and the benefit to the community in the rural village overlay zone. However, the alternative shading structures do not foreclose the use of trees for parking facility shading. Rather, they support economic development by taking into consideration the operational nuances of auto repair businesses which do not mix with trees. Auto repair businesses, and it's known in the industry, trees can cause damage to customer vehicles through falling sap or leaves. And it can definitely impact the business insurance. And if the business, in the event that they no longer have insurance due to tree damage, they cannot continue to operate. And I don't foresee that these alternatives will have a negative impact on the climate goals of the county. When you look and you drill down on the practical application of the zoning text amendment, there's really only 15 properties throughout the rural village overlay zone that have a commercial residential base zone that could take advantage of these alternative shade structures. And also, there's an equity argument, because alternative shade structures have been allowed in the more urban areas of the county. But if the planning board is inclined to remove the ability to use alternative shade structures, I would suggest the flexibility approach of allowing the property owner to plant the required amount of trees elsewhere on the property as long as they provide the 30% cool pavement within the parking facility. I think that's a way of balancing everybody's concerns there. So thank you. I appreciate your consideration of my comments and your attention to this matter. Thanks.

Well, thank you so much. Just a couple questions for you and staff. You can chime in. So the vehicle storage and the setback, I'm not quite getting why that wants to be. She has...

So the definition, the overlays requirement requires that all of its improvements have a certain setback. And in sort of expanding it to allow the board that flexibility. We sort of spelled out what all those features were, and I believe what is being requested is that we look at the original definition of the auto repair use, which also includes vehicle storage in addition to the parking, and would add that in here. So we have a comprehensive list.

Okay, so you're supportive of that.

It's fine.

Okay, and so that means that when you're looking at setbacks, if they're storing vehicles on the site, even that... whatever the vehicles are, that also has to be within that setback, can be no closer to, has to be set back that far too, right?

Yes, and I think it's unique in a use like this because There's sort of a fine line between where you're storing a vehicle versus parking a vehicle. I think a lot of auto repair uses don't mark out parking spaces to put the vehicles in. They just put them on pavement.

I see.

And so it's sort of a nuance that might be worth clarifying here. So staff's fine with that recommendation. Great.

And then Ms. Cerner said that where are alternative shade structures used? And are we allowed those in the code?

So it's something we're seeing more and more, as was mentioned, in urban parts of the county, particularly where the survivability of trees might not work or the placement of them is highly constrained. I think really the concern that staff have with the alternative shade structure is part of the way the ZTA was written as introduced is it's relying on sort of consistent with the intent of the overlay zone. And it's not clear was the intent of the shade structure to provide shade for the sake of urban cooling only, or was it... Providing shade to also like shade the human beings and I think if it was Just to shade the human beings the shade structured might work But if it had sort of a more nuanced approach and I think staff thinks it did based on one of the the principles of the overlay zone being connecting the overlay zone with the green surrounding area We think that the presence of the trees were a sort of deliberate introduction. And so we just sort of feel it's not super consistent with the role of village overlay zone not to have the trees. That said, I think there's something interesting about the proposal that was mentioned. Could we provide the same number of trees and just not plant them directly over top of where the vehicles will be parked and still provide the cooling treatment where the vehicles are parked, it's an interesting concept. I think in an ideal world, keeping closest to the intent of the zone is sort of staff's main preference. But I think in the spirit of compromise, I'm intrigued by this idea of providing the trees in an alternative location on site.

Yeah, because I was wondering, I don't know if the applicant, is there some uniqueness to the site where this you can't plant the trees where some pattern to create this shade, and to think about falling sap or trees? I mean, is it a place where all their old trees, and are you afraid they're going to fall? I mean, I generally have never heard that.

Can I piggyback on that question? Because I have a similar question. this is talking about expansion as well as sort of introducing new things. And I mean, plenty of auto dealerships I've seen are pretty much pavement edge to edge. I mean, a planting at that, in that case would require sort of a where are you going to plant if there's no way to get to the ground. So I'm interested in having some at least flexibility with the shade option, I think, because I think it's better to have, you know, be it on or off site with the planting in addition to the sort of the shade option. So I just wanted to piggyback on that for some comments from the witness and also the staff.

So with respect to the location of planting the trees, because the requirement requires that they provide shade on the parking facility, we're required to plant them close to the parking facility so that the tree expands and covers and shades that facility. And I think that relationship is really what creates the heartburn here for the auto repair businesses. Because if they're required to have the trees close to where the vehicles are stored or parked, then that increases the likelihood of damage. I think if there's an ability to put them, let's say, on the other side of the building, on the other side of the property, it definitely creates less stress from a business operational standpoint.

And I agree with Mr. Berber, too, that in general, it was not to create these heat islands, I guess, and and provide shading maybe for even customers who are going. If there's some flex, I'm all over flexibility as long as it meets the, and if there's some hardships that when the but it would be a limited use, they just go to DPS, right?

Right. If they're not enlarging the structure or building a new structure in a way that triggers it being considered new construction, in theory they would go to DPS for permit, and so DPS would look and say, where is your landscaping plan, showing that you've met this requirement. So, I mean, I think obviously at site plan, the board always has some flexibility, but this probably needs to be resolved in here so that if they're going straight to DPS, they know where to look.

So, I'm open to, like, if there's a... a requirement that 30% of the X has to be this, and if they did it some kind of way or whatever, then I don't care how they do it.

If we had, can I, sorry, I'm in an area in which I was concerned. If we allow for flexibility in the placement of the trees, and I think that's an important distinction between just the shade and then the human comfort aspect of it. But if we allow for some flexibility in the placement of the trees, I mean, the storage and parking of the vehicles is not where people are going to be for the most part, if I'm not mistaken, right? I mean, if you're allowing, you know, if you're encouraging the planting of the trees and say you're walking up to the front, you know, the front door of the location is where people will be more likely to, as opposed to the vehicle storage, which may be around back or the side or something like that. And so if we're If the goal is the human comfort, I think there's a benefit to allowing flexibility for placing those trees, and I think that's what's being asked here, is not to not have the trees, but to have an option of doing both and then placing them in places around the property, to place them where people interact with the property, more like customers and things interact with the property. Is that something that's been considered, or is that something that I think we can allow that flexibility in?

Yeah, I mean, I will say up until about a day and a half ago, I hadn't seen this concept written out. So we did prepare the slide because I think staff thought there was a chance the board would be interested in this. And so we sort of prepared language that we would propose that you would transmit if we went that way. You know, right, I think the ultimate recommendation was just to make the site a little bit greener. And we do always... on parking facilities have shading requirements. And so this is probably a way of addressing both. And I think staff can support that if that's the board's desire.

Yeah, we think the language as written on the slide would thread the needle and get both the outcomes that the board sort of highlighted.

And I understand, you know, I get for the most parking structures, but this is a situation which you wouldn't be interacting with that parking structure all that much, at least from a customer perspective, potentially, whereas you might on the other parts of the property. I think it's a reasonable compromise in that case.

Any comments or questions from the other board members? Mr. Rivers has done an outstanding job, and he's put in a lot of effort with his edits and suggestions, and it's always good to hear from you. Thanks.

May I ask one more question on the setback piece? Josh, did you have something else? No. Are we talking – and I wanted to make sure I was clear on the setback. Are we saying to retain the 100-foot rather than the 50-foot setback for those existing ones, assuming it meets the – if it triggers new construction? Is that what it is?

Yes. So opening the Houston, an existing building, would not require the setbacks. And the way it's written – minor modifications as allowed by the exemptions to platting also would not trigger new construction. But if a full new building came in or complete teardown and redo, it would be a new building, and that would trigger site plan. And so that's why I think staff feels it's actually better to just let the board modify the setbacks rather than just give a blanket statement that it's going to 50 feet.

Yeah. I mean, I... I like the ability of being able to modify the setbacks, but I'm also considering if you're looking at it and you look to see and it's 100 foot and you look at your site and 100 feet doesn't work, do you ever make that decision in the first place to get to the point where we can modify setbacks? I think the flexibility of 50 feet is worth considering, but 50 feet and also modify its site plan.

So the I'll say the ZTA is introduced did not give the board any flexibility It just reduced it from 100 to 50 feet And I think part of the hesitation is if this use has been deemed Sort of everywhere else in the county to need a hundred foot setback Is there something unique about the rural village overlay zone that those residential zones don't need the setback? You know and understanding like though it's a village and I think that's why staff thinks there should be flexibility but I think it should come with a board review of making sure other things like landscaping or other conditions at the site make that lesser setback okay here. So, you know, I think it's, our recommendation is it's cleaner and a little more code consistent to let the board modify it, but not give a carte blanche reduction sort of without looking at the characteristics of the site.

I'm just thinking that with things like the, you know, barriers, landscaping, whatever that might be, might, would be covered in other aspects of the zoning code, or is it the only place in which we would be able to adjust that setback or review that?

I think as part of the finding would say, because of landscaping and other either green or physical structures that could be erected, that's how you could find that it's appropriate to reduce the setback.

Given that these four areas are in some of the most rural parts of the county where There's been a number of planning decisions made to have the setbacks in place over time for compatibility, preservation of landscape, et cetera. We thought that the 100 foot was a reasonable dimension to stay with, give the board flexibility for future cases to make adjustments. There's also a lot of unique conditions like the split zoning and things like that that come into play for some of these sites. So we feel like if we... have the same setback as these things would have in other places, it's a good place to start. And then the board can always modify those setbacks, which would be, I think, more flexible than even just stating 50 feet and no less.

I mean, I like the addition of the flexibility. flexibility with the board, but also with the potential setbacks of 50 feet. I'm just trying to think what 50 feet looks like in most auto dealership, you know, auto repair shops that I've ever, you know, been to, and I'm not totally sure there's 50-foot setbacks on those, but it... Well, it's a 50-foot setback if it's, or a 100-foot setback if it's adjacent to residential.

If it's adjacent to more commercial, that doesn't apply.

So it's just, that's the other thing. So it's just if it's adjacent to the residential piece. In my case, no. Fine.

Yeah, not so much. Vice Chair. Okay, so thank you. Just a quick question. Is this, Mr. Noonan, is your client currently operating an auto repair place, and is it just non-conform? And she has to go get a permit? Okay, great. All right, great. So this is with these proposed changes. This looks great. It's a compromise. And so is the... Or a motion that staff transmit the comments to district council supporting ZTA 2609 with the amendments recommended and, well, as recommended today.

And we include the vehicle storage and the shade flexibility? Yes. Okay. Yeah, then a move to approve the, transmit the comments on the ZTA with the comments of staff, or the recommendations of staff and then the additional comments made today.

Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. The ayes have it. 4-0. Thank you. Thank you, staff. Thank you, client, for bringing this to our attention. All right. We're going to take just a two-minute break and then start with our next item, which is the item number 10, Clarksburg Library Mandatory Referral Water Quality Plan and Final Forest Conservation Plan, where staff is recommending approval with conditions. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. We're on item number 10, Clarksburg Library Mandatory Referral, Water Quality Plan, and Final Forest Conservation Plan, where staff is recommending approval of all of these. We have Josh Penn this afternoon presenting this item. Welcome, Mr. Penn.

Good afternoon. For the record, Josh Penn with Up County Planning Division. Like you said, we have Clarksburg Library before you. We have two mandatory referrals, MR-2026-030 and MR-2026-031. We have forest conservation plan F2260730 and a water quality plan that goes along with a mandatory referral, MR20206030. As you noted, staff is recommending approval with comments of MR 2026030. We are recommending approval of MR 26031. We are recommending approval with conditions of F 20260730, the Forest Conservation Plan. And we are recommending approval with conditions of the Water Quality Plan, MR 2026030. The site is located here in the red dashed line. It's at the intersection of Stringtown Road and Frederick Road within the Clarksburg Historic District. It is two parcels, parcel 198 and parcel 233. It is in the Clarksburg Special Protection Area and is zoned CRT.5. You can see here the existing conditions of the site. There's no streams, wetlands, floodplains, or any associated environmental buffers on the property. There is 3.36 acres of high priority forest. And since it's in the Clarksburg Historic District, it also has a historic asset named the Day House, which is a 1920s American four-square residence located on the corner. OK, so we're going to walk you through the first mandatory referral, which will be for the acquisition of 23200 Stringtown Road, parcel 198. It's about 3.66 acres. And you can see here outlined in blue. It is adjacent to what was originally the Clarksburg Fire Station site, which is just up here to the northwest. And the two parcels combined is slightly less than five acres. Now, part of the reason we're at this site here and not in the town center is the county council and the county executive passed Bill 3322, which is the four-building housing feasibility study, which means all new government projects, buildings, et cetera, have to have a housing component with them. When they did the test for the 1.1 acre site in the town center, they found that they could not have significant housing. Sorry about that. I don't know what this is doing. It's going crazy on me. I apologize. They said that they couldn't get sufficient housing onto the property with the library to say that it would work. So they explored other options. And one of the other options was this buying parcel 198. They tested this, and they found that it was several advantage compared to the original site. Subsequently, the county executive approved the purchase, and the county acquired it in April of 2024. So you notice that we're a little bit out of order doing the acquisition now, but they are retroactively doing it here for you today. Then we have the second mandatory referral, which is MR2026030. And this is for the library itself and the library amenities. It is a 20,906 square foot building. It is offering full public library services, has direct access to Frederick Road, The proposed public library will face Stringtown Road and have limited parking with most of the parking under the building at an at-grade garage. Stormwater management is being provided. All the public utilities and public facilities are being met. And exterior lighting is being designed to shield the adjacent residences from any intrusive glare while maintaining correct light levels for security of the library and the public building. Since we are in the Clarksburg Historic District and there is a historic use on the site, this was reviewed by our historic preservation staff and also by the HPC. We have the 1920s day house on the property. The proposal will require a historic area work permit. And the future rehabilitation of the day house, which will be at a future phase, will also require a separate hop or historic area work permit. The applicant team has presented to the HPC as a preliminary consultation at five HPC meetings. So it's been ongoing for about a year now. The library design has been revised based on the feedback from HPC and HP staff. HP staff and HPC have found the design to be contextual and compatible with the character of the historic district. And here's a nice little rendering of what it will look like from the roadway looking at the site. Our design team, I want to turn it over to Roberto Duke.

For the record, Roberto Duke with the Design, Placemaking, and Policy Division. As Josh was saying, the library will be pedestrian-oriented, and the main entrance will face Stringtown Road with the parking beneath and behind the building, as you can see in the drawing on the right. And in terms of the architecture itself, it will have a rural architectural character that references materials of a traditional barn, and the elevation has been divided into three bays. The two end bays will have red vertical metal panels, and the center bay will have a beige vertical panels, a stone veneer water table will ground the entire base of the building, and the materials will carry around to the sides of the building. Finally, in terms of its relationship with the day house, a tree-lined walkway and lawn area will be located between the day house to connect the library's main entrance and secondary entrance and to the parking area, and the landscaped area will foster a cohesive relationship between the day house and the library.

Going back on to the master plan, the original master plan for the original, but the 1994 is kind of the basis that set up for the location of the library and set up the town center area. And since then, there's been a lot of subsequent master plans. We have the 2011 limited plan, the 2014 10-mile creek master plan, and just recently the approved and adopted 2026 Clarksburg Gateway sector plan. I wanted to go through a little bit of that each here. The 1994 plan located the library within the town center. Neither the 2011 or the 2014 plan mentions the library location at all or the library itself, but they did highlight some many changes in the area since the plan has undergone since the 1994 plan was adopted. And then the 2026 plan acknowledges the library and makes several recommendations and also notes the location at the new location here at the corner of Frederick and Stringtown Road. For transportation, we have Stringtown Road here. Stringtown Road has an existing eight foot side path with an eight foot buffer. Frederick Road is MCDOT CIP project underway to construct an eight to 10 foot side path. And we're also constructing Clarks Ridge Road extension That connection will connect Clarksburg Square Road to Stringtown Road, will provide vehicle access to the site, and there will be six-foot sidewalks with at least six-foot buffers on both sides of the street. And there will be street parking along the road. There was an LATR assessment. They had 21 AM peak hour trips and 162 PM peak hour trips. Transportation study was required. The motor vehicle analysis, all study intersections are projected to operate below the congestion standards and thresholds. And the non-motor vehicle analysis found some deficiencies noted, but as the mandatory referral, the applicant is not required to provide mitigations. there is a recommendation that applicant provide short and long term bicycle parking and a sidewalk connection from the surface parking lot to the library entrance. So with this we have the Forest Conservation Plan F2026-0730. It is on CRT and has a land use category of IEDA. The net tract area is about 5.02 acres with 3.36 acres of forest being there. The applicant is proposing to remove all 3.36 acres of forest. 1.9 acres are being cleared for the library and 1.46 acres are shown as future clearing because that's where they're proposing to put the future housing. The afforestation requirement of 3.56 acres within the same watershed or 5.24 acres outside the same watershed. The applicant is proposing to meet this at a forest conservation bank or a fee-in-lieu if the banking is not available. And since this is in a historic district, we had to look at not just the 30-inch trees for the variance trees, but all trees one inches and greater. So there was a lot of trees on site that met that title or that definition. There are impacts to 10 variance trees and a removal of 166 variance trees. Planting of 398 caliper inches. on-site using three-inch caliber trees as mitigation, and the county arborist has recommended approval of the variance request also, because with the historic, we still involve the county arborist in the recommendation. There is a water quality plan, MR2026030. Since it was in the Clarksburg SPA, it has a water quality plan. There is no hard cap of impervious surface in the Clarksburg SPA, but they did minimize the impervious cover and kept it to 28.1%. MCDPS and MCDEP have both conditionally approved their elements of the water quality plan prior to this hearing. will meet the International Green Construction Code, incorporates compact design, photovoltaic panels on the roof to offset the 30% to 60% of the building's energy, and will have an all-electric HVAC system and EV charging stations within the garage. Staff does find that it conforms to the master plan, meets the requirements of the CRT zone, public facilities have been met and are adequate, complies with chapter 22A, and stormwater management. In conclusion, staff would like to just remind you we're recommending of approval with comments on MR2026030, which is the building. And then we have MR2026031, which which is the acquisition, which we're just recommending approval of. Then Forest Conservation Plan F20260730, we're recommending approval with conditions. And Water Quality Plan MR202030, we are recommending approval with conditions. Now with that being said, there was a last minute email from the applicant in terms of a few items I just want to get on the record. The applicant says that even though the plans indicate there are 38 spaces in the garage, they say there's actually 37 spaces in the garage. So if you want to ask them why, you can add. I'm just reading here. The plans indicated seven electric vehicle charging stations. And what I've been told is they have room for seven, but they have only committed to building two at this point. Thank you. And I'm here for any questions. And I'm sure the applicant here is here if you want to ask any questions of them.

Yes. First, we have Ms. Kate Kubit to provide some public testimony from Elm Street. And then we'll have the applicant provide their testimony. testimony or their presentation if they'd like. Thank you.

Good afternoon. For the record, my name is Kate Cubitt, and I am with Elm Street Development. We, Elm Street, is the developer of Clarksburg Town Center. So I want to start off today by recognizing that we understand we are late to the conversation about this particular subject. However, we want to go on record with our view about the location of the Clarksburg Library. We enthusiastically support a Clarksburg Library. However, we are very opposed to the location on Stringtown Road. I will tell you why. But before we get there, I would like to summarize our current status at Clarksburg Town Center. Clarksburg Town Center is a lovely community. It's got 1,100 occupied homes and amenities, schools, parks, and so much more. We are currently actively developing the final piece of Clarksburg Town Center, the retail core, with a plan that you all approved back in 2024. So an amended plan. There's been many amendments on this plan. This was one of them. With that, with this amended plan and the development that we are doing, We will add about 100,000 square feet of retail and commercial space, which is greatly desired by the community, and about 189 additional housing units to the community as well. Clarksburg Town Center is where it is today, not only through a collaborative 15-year effort between the community, Park and Planning, the county, and Elm Street. Now back to the library. We oppose the library location on Stringtown Road for two reasons. We believe that the library location does not fulfill the decades-long vision for Clarksburg or Clarksburg Town Center, and we believe that this new library location, while technically co-locating future housing, does not maximize nor does it expedite housing and affordable housing in this county. First, the location of the library does not align with the long-held vision for Clarksburg or that of Town Center. Remember, we have 1,100 occupied homes here. So all of these residents moved in, or the vast majority of them moved in, thinking that there would be a library in their community. So a civic use in Clarksburg Town Center was first identified, as Josh points out, in the 1994 master plan. And for the past 20 years, the many amendments in Clarksburg Town Center, so everyone that was approved by the planning board, showed a library parcel on the plans. So to that end, we at Elm Street not only located a library parcel in the retail core strategically, so it's in the retail core, but it's also located next to the housing in this community as well and will be directly across the street, the 189 units, 24 of which are MPDUs, that you all approved back in 2024. The retail core parcel in Clarksburg Town Center is fully developed. with a parking lot ready to go. The retail court parcel also was deeded to the county many years ago under the auspices that a library would be built on this particular parcel. The cost to build a library on the parcel in Clarksburg Town Center will be about half the $40 million projected amount for the library on Stringtown Road. The town center community wholeheartedly agrees with our position on this and has testified to this extent to the county council back in 2024 when the HOA board appeared in person to provide their testimony to the council. Second, we oppose the Stringtown Road location because the housing component here does not appear to be well planned or planned at all. The Stringtown Road library plans show only the library and they don't show any housing at all. Based on our experience, we do not think that the library site will maximize housing on this site, and it will make future housing development very expensive. If the county is seriously trying to maximize housing and affordable housing and get it built in this location, the Stringtown Road site should be used for housing only and would be realistically redesigned from the ground up for housing only. For these two reasons, we oppose the library at the Stringtown Road location, and we ask that you, the planning board, transmit your recommendations to county council that the site on Stringtown Road be replanned for housing only, and that the library be built on the fully developed insight that was deeded to the county for this particular purpose. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Ms. Kubit. Would the applicant come up and make a presentation? And if you're able to, can you speak to why the library isn't going where it was supposed to go?

Good afternoon. My name is Hamid Omidwar. I'm Division Chief of Building Design Construction with Department of General Services. The main reason is that mandate and the bill that the county executive asked for and the council approved it. And they did a study. It is the county goal to do more than what we can, affordable housing. And based on that bill, this was the opportunity, and it was approved by the county council. So it's the main reason.

Would you like to talk any more about the proposed library?

Sure. Absolutely. Well, Josh did a good job explaining all the details. We've been designing on this project for quite some time. We actually had a complete design, and then we enjoyed working with HPC. And the new design that you see meets all the requirements of the historical. It's about 20,000 square foot library, which is composed of a big area for the shelving combined of adults and young adults. and younger ones inside. It has two conference rooms that is designed such that after hour, if the library closed, that can be opened with the restroom for the community to use. Below it, because if you wanted to build, the topography of the site is such that from the Stringtown Road, by the time you get to the end of the library on the north side, it drops tremendously. And building the parking not under the library would have kind of not been nice for green design and would have produced a lot of impervious asphalt or concrete areas. So by tucking it under the library, we did two goals with one shot. not create impervious areas and cut more trees. And the other one was not to fill the site and create another problem on the north of it. So it was all environmental aspects and environmental reason that we did this. The library enjoys the prominence at the string tunnel road. That cross-section is very important. Across the street, there is a shopping center with lots of stores. It's very active. There is a new construction on the northwest of us, which the board has approved that project. So it's a very active corner. There's a historical building that we created by request of the Historical Commission, rightfully, a synergy between the library. We provided doors and access and some activated landscaping between the two. And Department of Library is looking into activate the house, possibly by some... like a gallery or museum of library or literacy information. It's still under decision. That would be the next project, next phase that we do. As Josh mentioned, the Clark Street Ridge Road connects the north side to the Stringtown. It's following master plan, basically. But it accommodates the town center quicker access and walk into the facility. It's a green building, and we have PV panels on the roof. All the facades are created, which not only in look matches the historical requirements of the Clarksburg, but also in efficiency provides a very efficient building. Its interior of the building enjoys modern library concept. Exterior of it complies with the historical requirement. It still is nice looking, very nice looking. The Clarks Ridge, when we designed it, working with DOT, we decided to put some parking on both sides of it to give it a little more residential-looking activity to it, so Clarks Ridge is not just a quick pathway for control. The housing, which comes later, we did some feasibility study. We do not have the developer yet, and for that reason, we don't know exactly how... how it's going to be shaped. The feasibility study says how many you could possibly build, but it doesn't exactly design it yet, which means it will be another site plan review if the developer comes to you. And we accept all the recommendations. Most of them are in action now. We're working on them. I don't know if you have any other questions.

Thank you for the explanation. I missed the point of the presentation.

do the plat record for the entire site for the developers, because we don't have the developer yet. But since this is our property and we are not building over property lines, as soon as we know the developer, which we hope sooner than later, then we come back and create that.

So I just want to ask a question.

And then we do the dedication at that time.

The, so it's clear that the site was chosen, the location was moved to facilitate the co-location of the library and housing, right? Whereas you assess that the previous location was infeasible. I guess I have two questions. So my first question is, we see the library presented here, And as you just described, there's no current design for the housing component. There's no partner chosen. We have nothing to look at to see how the two will interact. The housing looks like the only location for it is on the east part of the site, which will then be adjacent to or closest to the Clarksburg town center. But we have no idea how those are going to interact and relate to each other. Right now, the library is completely disconnected from the Clarksburg Town Center, and you haven't shown any connectivity other than just following the road network west, north, and then east, which is half a mile, instead of some path network kind of going through. So my first question is, why don't we see the housing plan here, too? If the reason for the location change was co-locating it, why don't we have a holistic plan and a set of designs to look at and review all at once?

Good question. In terms of connection between the library and the town center, the Clark Street Road in the master plan was to accommodate it. So it will connect this parcel to the town center via pedestrian or the vehicular thing. Again, I mentioned that this was approved by the county council, but when I said feasibility study, the feasibility study, which actually was done by the architects, Guillermo and Parker, who designed the library, showed graphically how the housing could look like, but it was just to study and prove to the county council that it's feasible. when we contract with the developer or partner with them to do that, the real design, how it looks, how big it is, what form it is, it will come then. So we have ideas, and we have drawings for those ideas as a feasibility study, but it's not a design that would be submitted for approval.

Well, so I'm still wondering, though, why wasn't the plan... Why wasn't a holistic plan designed to include the housing together and then brought forward to us, obviously, but then kind of through the process? Why are we waiting for the housing? Is something going on where you can't do the housing and the library at the same time?

No, not that I'm aware of. It's just the CIP world is that all these projects are approved individually, and they have time on it, and this library was designed a long time, and the community was waiting for the library, is waiting for the library, and the other one comes after, but it was since the construction of the library was an approved CIP, it had to proceed, and we proceeded with it, but the housing development executive and it's going to happen. It's just that they're two different projects.

Has an RFP been listed?

They are working on it. It's a different group in our general services that is working on that aspect of it. We, the group, we are building the county public facilities but the site is called for that. It's approved for that by the county council. It cannot be something else. It's just that The plot is not ready to be presented to Park and Planning. It will come for the site plan review when it's designed to your attention.

Okay. I appreciate kind of the context there. I like we're doing this a little bit backwards to me. I understand that CIP projects are distinct. I don't really understand the reason why This couldn't have been a cohesive design together that could have been moved forward. I'm not saying this was your group's charge. I think this comment is maybe more directed at the choice made from others about how to proceed in this situation. But I don't think this is the right way to develop this concept or this site, considering the whole reason it was moved was to have these done together. And we have no idea how the housing is going to relate to this. We have no idea if the library is constraining the housing, if it's enabling the housing. We have nothing to sort of base that on other than the feasibility study, which we haven't seen. So we have to take your word for that. I'm not suggesting that there's something wrong with the feasibility study. But in terms of our mandatory referral review, It's just we don't really have much to go on. Hearing the comments from EYA about, in their view, there's a more optimal site, which was the previous site. Sorry, Elm Street. Apologies. There's a lot of E's in the community. Sorry about that. But, you know... I guess I'll just leave it there for now. I don't understand why we're not seeing housing here in the same process. It feels like it's an afterthought, to be completely frank, and it shouldn't be. And the whole reason it was moved was so it wouldn't be an afterthought, right? The policy is so that housing is not an afterthought, but yet here we are. Yeah.

I tend to agree and have the same comments. It rings a little hollow that we moved it because of housing, but we didn't plan for housing. We don't have the feasibility study for the original site. There is no connectivity between this site and the town center. It's two miles away. That's not reasonable to say in this position. It's not near any other housing. And we're not even clear in the forest. We're counting it as cleared. It's counted as cleared acreage, but it's not cleared. I lend toward sending this back for more thought and not approving the mandatory referral at this point because this is moving it for no good reason that I can see. And if you're attempting to co-locate it with housing, you ought to co-locate it with housing. You're going to put it on there, and there's not going to be any that's going to come up. You need to be able to develop the entire site. At the same time, particularly given the land value there, which is going to go for a relatively low density style of housing, townhomes at best, I would imagine. And so it says affordable and low income housing all over the report, but there's no actual, there's no plan here. There's no RFP that we've seen. There's no guarantee that one's coming out. I would, at this point, be recommending not to approve the mandatory referral.

I'd like to commend Kate Kubit and the Elm Street developers. When developers set out to deliver, there's three promises they have to deal with. The promise to the county that they're going to comply with the law and the plan, and the promise to the community that they're going to deliver. and then the ongoing promise to the community that once they deliver, that the plan will come together and will serve the community's interest. And when I saw Kate Cubitt's name here, I was surprised that she was showing up today. But it's commendable because Elm Street promised, and Elm Street lived up to the promise, and Elm Street delivered a parcel and developed that parcel so that a library could be developed there to be used by the people that they sold to. And then the county didn't live up to its promise by building a library there. I'm concerned that a developer lives up to cohesive Delivery and their reputation for delivering and plans coming together because when people purchased homes there their expectation was there would be a library along with retail and so Elm Street delivers and now the county decides to build a library somewhere else and it affects the reputation of Elm Street and how they develop and deliver when the county doesn't live up to their promise and my question is Elm Street deeded and developed land for a library. And is that land still restricted for a library or will it be used for something else? Or will it be given back to Elm Street to develop for the shopping center for something else to benefit the residents that purchase from Elm Street?

One of them. Are you going to answer it? Or are you? OK. So why don't we just step back a second, OK?

Is that a question he can't answer?

Or is that something we don't know?

I don't know. Can you answer it? Kate Kubit might be able to answer it. I'm really interested in it because when we look at, you know, a developer taking a risk and the developer's reputation amongst the community, right, and they have a selling point, hey, we're going to develop houses and we're going to put a library here, bye, and then the developer does their part and then the county doesn't do their part, I think that's a concern that we have an opportunity to address here. Right. And I think that Ms. Kubit might have an answer.

Well, yeah, if we have more history, I mean, this is sort of into us at the, you know, so it's hard to comment on. But if you'd like to give us your version of the story, but here's what I think, and we can comment on this in our transmittal letter, but there's a couple things here, and this is my recommendation. I'd like staff to put up where the library was supposed to go. So you have on the site plan, but a couple of things I want to say. A couple of things we can comment on based on the information is that the mandatory referral for the library, which is the B, we are supposed to, staff is to write recommendations on the design of the library. Does it meet certain criteria? And let's tick off some of these things. This is B, which is Clarksburg Library, staff recommendation approval to transmit comments. So I think the library itself is an attractive design. It feels like staff is saying it meets what I understand meets the requirements. What we would have is requirements for a library, right? You know, the pathways, transportation, stuff like that. I'm just trying to get, is that true?

That's true, and it went through multiple rounds of HPC review with our historic preservation staff. that I'm eyeballing now, I believe the design is fully fleshed out and acceptable.

And that's why you, and that was, that's the B piece, correct? The MRR2026030, correct? Correct. Okay, then there's the water quality plan. We are, they had a water quality plan and we are recommending that that be approved. It went through its right process and And that was your recommendation.

Ms. Amy Lindsay is here on behalf of environmental. Do you want to take a seat up front?

For the record, Amy Lindsay, Environment and Climate Division. So yes, the water quality plan did go through the correct process. I will note that this is the Clarksburg Special Protection Area, which does not have an impervious cap. However, it still has to go through the process And there were a lot of concerns with the water quality plan, not about the level of imperviousness, but the location of the stormwater management facilities. When you're looking at... Future development on the site, particularly if part of the site is being conveyed, there were some questions about where the stormwater was going to be located and making certain that the future housing was not going to be encumbered by stormwater facilities, but it did go through the correct review process, and DPS did write an approval letter for their portion of the water quality and approval.

And we concur. Whatever tech things, we went through it, and DPS said yes, and we said no. Whatever. Yes, that is correct. And then the last, the forest conservation plan, that's our plan to review and approve, and we went through it and approved it.

Well, you will be approving it.

I mean, yes, but you are recommending that we approve the forest conservation plan.

If you are going to build the library here, and the housing here, yes. There is a substantial amount of forest clearing associated with this that is being driven by the location of the library and the future housing.

Yeah. May I ask a clarifying? So there is, from the staff report, there is a portion of about one and a half acres on the site that's being counted as cleared, but not actually being cleared because there's no housing being proposed. But it's being counted as cleared for the purposes of the forest conservation plan?

That is correct. With forest, we either consider it retained and protected or cleared.

It's either an easement or cleared, exactly, in that case.

OK. So now let's go to the A, which is the Stringtown Road. I mean, it's unfortunate, but this is sort of like just learning about the story, right? You know, really. And I understand that the property is already purchased, isn't it? So you're asking us to approve. Is this the A is purchased? For us to approve the purchased acquisition?

Correct. The 031 is for the acquisition. The 030 is for the building. As you saw in the slides, I have it here, the dates of the, bear with me for one second. But yes, it was approved by the county council and the executive and purchased. Technically, prior to that purchase, they should have done a mandatory referral for acquisition. I don't know why it didn't happen, but we're here today.

Yes, I mean, I think that's a good enough reason for us to disapprove, to recommend disapproval of the acquisition if the process wasn't followed, saying nothing about why that happened. But if the process, you know, wasn't followed and it didn't give us and staff and other property owners in the area to weigh in at the time, I mean, that feels like a big, you know, and so now we are where we are, where we're trying to kind of retroactively figure out what to do. To me, that feels like a pretty clear case of not approving the mandatory referral for that particular piece of this.

Yes, and I was going the same way. What we can approve is what we can't approve. It's already built up, purchased, so we don't need our approval to purchase something that's already purchased, right? And so I don't think we can comment on the acquisition. I mean, I'm looking at our...

I mean, something that's already, they've already- Well, I mean, mandatory referral is always a recommendation in any event. So you can still voice your recommendation towards that acquisition, even though, yes, it has happened. You can still say, you know, denial or- Well, I don't know the whole story.

I mean, I'm just, I mean, unless you guys know, do you know the story? It's hard to approve or disapprove. I mean, we can't approve. And all I could say is that we can approve these others. It's for library and met the requirements other than the design for the water quality, met whatever. And the forest conservation, if this is what they're going to do, then this meets our forest conservation. But in terms of the... To put in our letter that we don't feel that we can say approved on this acquisition because we don't know the whole story here.

Let's quickly say that out of the state land use article, mandatory referrals required for acquisition, disposition, and development of Public or government properties that's that's one element of it and we have DGS here if they would they would like to inform You know Perhaps the mandatory referral here was a little out of order. We're trying to package these two things together for you Simultaneously, but yes while technically out of order maybe they could explain a little more of why this property was deemed appropriate versus the town center and perhaps why they acquired it ahead of schedule in filing the mandatory referral.

No, I understand that. But I don't think they were here. I mean, are you here today to defend your reason? I mean, I'm just saying, is these, I don't think, if they knew what they were here today, I mean, I think they're here to defend the architecture. I don't know if they're here to defend the acquisition. I'm not sure what they're... You're absolutely correct.

It's a project, and I think there's two separate things. The acquisition, it should have happened some time ago. Fine. But this is a project that we have. It's approved by the council. The property is already purchased, and the council has public meetings and approved the purchase. And it's a bill. It's a done deal by the county council, which has authority on this. Now, the disconnect, I'm an architect and urban designer myself. I hear you clearly. I understand. But it's not like we don't have housing or anything else that happens after something else is happening. And it happens all over the town. It's not like The entire block is designed at the same time because it makes sense. Sometimes realities are different. So in this case, this is the reality. There was a vision that there should be housing, affordable housing with this project. The vision was studied. It says, yes, we can build it so the project can continue. And then here we promised, and it's on the record, that the development of the housing, which The Historical Commission and the commission has chance as a site plan review, not mandatory, to review it and provide comments if it works with everything that is around it. It's not like the library is going to negate the housing behind it. So I understand, but at the same time, I think I agree with the chair that we're here for the approval of the library.

Was there anything in the council bill approving this project that said it needed to happen first, the library needed to happen first before housing?

It was already approved with the timing on it. So the CIP project has a time on it. And it's public record. And you can find it. It has time on it, yes. It's not timeless. There is a deadline and a time on this.

Those time frames are imposed by the council, correct? So the CIP is updated every two years and the money is allocated to projects within that time frame, correct? And so it's not as though the money goes away, right? It's just that projects are specified to begin within a certain time frame, right? But that can be extended, or that can be modified. Those are all choices that we can make.

I don't know about that. That's the council's prerogative. Projects are commitment to the public and the community. And I cannot here tell you that. we have that authority to delay a project because the housing was not presented at the same time.

100%. I understand that. I think most of these comments, if not all of them, are directed at a different kind of audience, I guess. Can I just say one thing, Vice Chair?

There are plenty of county projects that are supposed to be code. located or co-whatever, and they don't necessarily go at the same time. I remember their fire station on Neville Street. They built the fire station first, and something's supposed to, you know. But at the time, they were saying, I think there's other. So this is not unique that they don't go together.

But I think what we have sometimes seen But sometimes we don't see is at least plans that describe both components at the same time. And, you know, two and a half years ago or two years ago, we saw a mandatory referral for the parking garage in downtown Silver Spring. That was part of the United Therapeutics deal that the county had worked on. Right. they said at the time that affordable housing was going to be kind of in the rear of that parking garage. And we, we asked, you know, that was, we asked, you know, we asked a lot of things about that project. Could you put housing on top? Could you construct it? So the future housing could go on top. Um, but similarly they didn't present the affordable housing as part of the mandatory referral and our, you know, that, that remains a problem because if you don't show how these things go together and are compatible together, and you don't have partners that are part of that process, you don't actually know what's constructible in the remaining space. And I guess we want to see housing in this location. I mean, ideally, there would have been more discussion with the community, it sounds like, and Elm Street, who's developing the town center, about the location change. But that ship has sailed. I think now, at least for me, I just want to see the housing. I don't want it to be an afterthought, and so I'm inclined to disapprove of the property acquisition just given the process for that, but I'm also inclined to deny the Forest Conservation Plan and ask that the county executive and his team come back with a single, cohesive, coordinated plan to show us how the housing fits on the site. Get a partner, show us the plan and design so we can see everything together. Otherwise, it's really hard for us to understand how this relates to an ongoing, very important project in the county and how people who live in the town center will access the site. So that's where I sit right now. I think that we deny the Forest Conservation Plan and ask them to come back with a more holistic plan that shows the housing.

So I appreciate what you said. My feeling is that we should deny the acquisition and say why we deny the acquisition and say that it's because it's not, one, it's already purchased. And then two is because you said there's no, even though they're not building it now, that there is no plan to show how the housing and the project and the library go together. But I would move forward with the B, C, and D, but we're a board, its majority goes, and I'd like to hear how some of the others do.

Very few of the situations that we've described before where there's the potential co-location of housing have used housing as a justification for the purchase and the acquisition. And so that's another thing that concerns me is also the Silver Spring parking garage issue is that it wasn't even built to the standards that housing could be put on top of it, something we asked for during the mandatory referral. And so without an actual plan for the co-location of housing, plus having not brought it before us before the acquisition, yeah, I'm inclined not to approve either A or D. I was just saying there are plenty examples of projects in the past where the county, they're co-located and

They built one without the other, and it's moved forward. But Commissioner Bartley, we need to bring this home.

It's unfortunate that my question to the county couldn't be answered with regards to the deed that was provided by Elm Street in the development.

Well, she can still come up. If you want her, let's give her a minute.

Yeah, I would like to hear. Thanks.

Kate Kubit, for the record, can you specifically ask me the question so I can answer it appropriately and concisely, or try to?

Thanks, Kate Kubit. During your presentation, you pointed out that a parcel was specifically deeded over to the county for the construction of the library. And my question is, is that land still deeded over to the county, and are there any future plans for that deeded parcel, and if there are no future plans by the county for that parcel, will they be surrendering it back to Elm Street for further development?

So the deed, it was the parcel remains deeded to the county, so the county retains ownership. And the way the deed was drafted, we drafted it in such a way that if a county, civic, use was not provided here, the deed would be reverted back to Elm Street. However, as we worked through the process with the county, the county struck that language from the deed and would not allow that language to be included in the deed. So as it stands, the county owns the ground, and there's no plans to return it to Elm Street or the HOA or anybody else out there that I am aware of, at least.

Did the county purchase the land from Elm Street, or was that part of a requirement for the development to go forward?

It was a requirement. It was a condition of approval of our 2015 site plan that we developed the site and we deeded over by a certain specific time in order for building permits on the site to be released. So in order to fulfill that obligation, we developed the site and deeded the site over as required.

If the property was deeded back over to Elm Street, would Elm Street consider building houses on that parcel?

So that's a good question. We would work with the community, I think, because we've worked with the community for 15 years on this project. My thought is that the community doesn't necessarily want to see housing here. They would like to see a library or a civic use here, a park, a community garden. But they probably would not prefer to see housing here because of what they feel that they, or what they were told when they bought their property and what was kind of promised at the time when they bought their property in the community.

So, sorry, just to clarify, so if the property that you're describing, it would not revert back to Elm Street ownership? The county retains it?

I mean, the way the deed is written and currently recorded, that is correct.

Okay, the county retains it. Yes, that's correct. Yeah. So, I mean, that's another of a series of questions that we don't know if there is a plan for that parcel, given that the location of the library has moved. There's a lot of unanswered questions as part of this. And I think it is, to be completely frank, I think it's sort of the responsible action at this stage to deny the FCP and try to get answers to some of these questions and try to understand what the plan actually is for housing, what the plan is for that site, where it goes, what happens on it. I understand the community has been waiting for the library for a long time, but that's no reason to rush through something that may not be 100% baked.

I hear you. I asked staff, can you just show us where the town center is located and the commercial and residential pieces?

You probably know this area better than I do, but I believe this area right in here is where the library site is. Where the original?

The original 1.1 acre site of the town center.

And then this is the current site down here.

Here is to be developed. Okay. And someone was asking about a link from the current library site to, no, the current library site is further to the West, isn't it?

This is the new site here, and Clarksburg Ridge Road will come up through here, connect into here, and they would have to come over here to get to town center, which would be up in here.

I think it would be nice to know the distance, because it's not two miles. It's less than one-eighth of a mile. Okay.

So my recommendation is is to not approve the acquisition. And in the letter, we would say why it's already purchased. And there's no sort of formal how the housing and the library would work. And approve the B, C, and D, because I just think that it's The county is going to move forward with the library at the proposed location anyway. And the commissioner, Vice Chair Linden, would like to just not approve A or, I guess, A, none of it.

Can we be clear? Instead of referring to the letters, can we refer to what each of the things is? One is that A is, I would...

recommending that we do not approve the acquisition because it's already purchased. And there's no plan for how the library and the residential would work together. I mean, there's just no. And then, but approve the design of the library. I mean, because you said it meets the requirements. water quality plan, because DPS has approved the water quality plan, and we have no issues with that. And D is the forest conservation plan, because we reviewed the forest conservation plan, and it meets our requirements. Is that what I hear staff saying?

Just real quick, the forest conservation plan issue is a little bit more complicated than that. We are basing the forest conservation plan, and Amy, if she needs to speak to it, can refer to this. But the amount of forest clearing was only allowed based upon the fact that the housing was there. So there is an excess of forest clearing, about two acres of forest clearing, that currently has no purpose if the housing does not get relocated, does not get located there.

And this was a question I was coming to ask on the, because we're approving, with the Forest Conservation Plan, we're approving a variance. And one of the findings of the variance is that this is not due to the actions of the applicant. And I would argue that the actions of the applicant in purchasing a different property from where they had already had planned a thing is possibly a reason not to approve the variance for the Forest Conservation Plan. I'm rereading the portions of the Forest Conservation Plan under the variance, and it's not a special privilege, and it's not, you know, it meets our water quality standards. But positions are based on conditions or circumstances which are the result of actions by the applicant. I would say that the decision to change the location is a circumstance or condition created by the applicant and the removal and the variance needed to remove, I lost track of the number of trees, would be a reason to reject the variance under the Forest Conservation Plan.

And I think just to build on that just quickly, if we approve the Forest Conservation Plan, which is clearing based on hypothetical housing in the future, but then the housing doesn't come, let's just say, let's just use that scenario. We have massive amounts of forest clearing, no housing. I mean, we understand that the plan is to bring housing, but the Forest Conservation Plan is anticipating housing. We have nothing to sort of... base that calculation on other than we think that it's going to take this area. But we don't have any designs to base it on, correct?

But they're not removing that. Its design is based on removing the forest. But in the temporary, if they only build the housing, they're not going to remove that forest. But the calculation was assuming that they were going to remove the forest, right? They're not going to remove that forest if they're not going to build the house. So I can make a motion for what I said. If you don't approve, we can do another motion.

Can I just, seeing where this may be going, I'm wondering if Given that the applicant is the county DGS, if we want to, in some way, give a little deference to the county and offer a deferral of this for a week, if you think that there may be some of the outstanding questions that you could get some assurance if other folks from the county would be able to come and answer some questions. Obviously, they're not going to come with a detailed plan for housing. But I'm wondering if we defer for a week. If that gives an opportunity, you can kind of go down the same path a week from now.

May I ask a question along those lines? I'm happy to support giving them a week's deference to come with more information and a reasonable plan, potentially a draft RFP or something I think would be... It would be reasonable to approve that. Is it possible to address the first three motions, the motion for property acquisition, the referral for the library and the referral for the water quality ban and defer the forest conservation a week? Would that make life easier or would that be more of a pain?

I would not do that. I appreciate your... I would either... Director Sartori, great. Because we had not planned to talk really about this, meaning about this is more information that we had not... understood before today, at least for me, that I would prefer to defer it, one, or two, what I had proposed. Because I think the county, these wonderful people from the county were here to talk about They're not, they weren't here when, in the room when it happened, okay? And so, so I think- And reasonable, I completely agree. So I would prefer that we have, we defer it for a week to get some of our answers, our questions answered, and then come back, come back a week, come back two weeks.

I'm okay with that too. And I think the two kind of big questions on my mind, of course, are, you know, to Commissioner Hedrick's point, you know, can we get assurances about a timeframe to see some movement on the housing component, whether it's a draft RFP, whether it's other parts of the process and when that will start, assurances there. And the other big question is the site that, may or may not get deeded back, or may or may not go back to Elm Street? Does the county have any plans for that site? And if so, can they share?

I may make one more request on that. For the forest conservation plan for the determinations for the variants, I would like a little more investigation of conditions or circumstances as a result of actions by the applicant. I would like to make sure that we're clarifying that because I think there's a case to be made that the movement of the site is a condition or circumstance created by the applicant to, you know, I can see the one site and it doesn't have any trees on it and I can see this site has got a whole bunch of trees on it. So there's an option there. I would just like to see if there's either case law or previous situations in which we've made determinations along that line.

I was just going to turn to counsel and just ask whether the official term would be a continuance, just so that there's not a requirement for reposting or whatever. We're pausing. We're going to recon, like whatever the...

That was my same question. Would we be tabling this or continue?

No, we're going to continue. And we need to say what the date is. So it's either next week or it's the 30th. We need to make that decision now so that it's on the record.

Yeah, I would not do it next week. I think they need some time, the 30th, and to see if that's a reasonable time with the county.

So as long as someone from the county can be available for that, I guess that would be the date.

So is there a motion to continue this item on the 30th to get more clarity on why this site was chosen, the timing of when the residential is also coming, more fleshed out plan for that, the question about what happens to the previous property that was deeded

And may I ask for a copy of the feasibility study that was conducted as well? Because it was indicated that there was a feasibility study conducted on the original site, and I'd like to see a copy of that.

I agree with that. And I do know that there's been a lot of discussion with the community, the county, and the community about finding a library site. The library site was really important for the community. So I know that there was a lot of discussion with the county and a lot of thought through this. So we need to have someone from the county come and talk to us about it. Thank you.

All right. I would move for a continuance to July 30th or our July 30th meeting, provided we receive the information just discussed. Second. All in favor?

Aye. Aye. The ayes have it. Thank you all for coming. Thank you. All right. So we'll take just a two-minute break. and come up with our last item of the day that will be just as exciting. We're on our last item of the day. It's 5011 Olney-Laytonsville Road Animal Boarding and Care Facility Conditional Use, where staff is recommending approval with conditions of the conditional use and transmit those to the hearing examiner. We have Mark Beal today presenting this item. Welcome, Mr. Beal.

Thank you. For the record, Mark Beal, Up County Planner. Today, yes, I bring you the conditional use for the animal boarding and care facility located at 1511 Alney-Laytonsville Road. The conditional use number is CU202603. So you will see staff is making recommendations of approval with conditions be transmitted to the hearing examiner for an animal boarding and care facility. There's one little change in the conditions. It's just a date change. We got a revised, updated letter from MCDOT on July 7th. So as far as noticing requirements, everything's been noticed correctly. The signs for OSA are posted on site. Staff has not received any community correspondence. As the planning board is aware, the applicant submitted a letter disagreeing with the dedication over the last few days. So just a little history on this. We met with the applicant in September of 2024. We went over the discussion of getting the agency reviews done as far as stormwater management, fire department access, well and septic, MCDOT and SHA. The transportation planner at the time had mentioned there may be some frontage improvements as well as dedications needed. We suggested that they do a concept plan to get everybody to the table to be able to have those discussions. We didn't have any follow-up meetings after that, and there was not a concept plan submitted. In the fall of 2025, they filed for the conditional use in our office, and it was accepted towards the end of November of 2025. We did discuss at DRC, as well, the comments from DRC did talk about dedications along Olney-Laytonville Road, as well as the Zion Road frontage. So we did actually meet with the applicant team not long after that in February. We went over the dedication requirements. It was pointed out to us then at that time they weren't going to meet the 200-foot exercise setback requirement in the zoning ordinance. So we suggested that they file for a variance at the time and that staff would get behind and support the variance request. So staff has compromised on a few things with the project, just to give you a heads up. We actually worked with them, the environmental section worked with them to do two separate forest conservation exemptions for the project. That way it avoided the NRI, FSD, and forest conservation plan. Staff also removed the requirements for frontage improvements along both frontages. And staff also is not asking for fee in lieu or the associated grading along either one of the frontage improvements. Staff also worked with the applicant to tailor the trip mitigation because it's not atypical use, which I'll get into later. So again, the property is located at 5011 Olney-Laytonsville Road. It's in the northwest corner of the intersection of Olney-Laytonsville Road and Zion Road, right here outlined in the red dotted line. The property is zoned AR, as well as the properties to the northwest and to the southeast are all zoned AR. You can see there's one little property to the north that's zoned R200. the property to the northeast and southwest are zoned re1 it is located in the 2005 on the master plan it's also in the Upper Rock Creek special protection area and staff recognized some special exceptions in the area one being across Zion Road for a group home use over there and then the subject property has a special exception with some modifications for a horticultural nursery and associated greenhouses and landscape contractor. So the existing property is a little over 28 acres. It is AR zone, like I mentioned. Again, I mentioned the special exception, which was initially approved in 1967. And it has frontage on both Walney-Laytonsville Road as well as Zion Road. Currently, there is a main entrance off of Walney-Laytonsville Road in this location right here. And there's a secondary entrance off of Zion Road in this location here. So here's just some existing pictures of what you're what's out on site right now. The current building that is going to be renovated for the doggy daycare is in this location here. Here's just a picture of the outside of the building, along with the inside of the building. So the applicant is proposing an animal boarding and care facility in the existing building in this location. There's an outdoor exercise area shaded in green here. And then there's an area over here, which I'll show you in some other pictures, that will be used for the asphalt parking. And the applicant will be installing new fire department access requirements with an underground cistern and a pump house, which you can see the part of it right here. And again, I'll show you some other pictures here in a minute. So picture A is looking, I was standing a couple hundred feet off of the building, looking towards where the outdoor play area's gonna be. This area, the B picture, is actually the grassy area between this building and that building, is where the cistern and pump house will be located. This building here will be demolished and removed. It's dilapidated, it's falling down, so it will be removed. D is the parking area, which will get restriped and everything to show the dedicated parking for the animal boarding and care facility. In the staff report, we talked about there was no screening requirements because there was only one house that had a residential detached house in a residential zone. So I wanted to get a picture of that, what you're seeing in the distance here. This is existing screening and buffer that's there. It's on the subject property, not on the neighboring property. And as you can see, you cannot see the house that's on the other side of that area. So there's plenty of screening. And keep in mind, this is several hundred feet away from where the actual doggy daycare use or animal boarding and care use is going to be located. So the property is located in the Olney Master Plan, as I described before, and there are no specific recommendations. So for transportation, the vehicle access for the site will remain unchanged. Again, I mentioned before, there are three entrances. Entrance number three is chained up, locked up, Entrance number two is kind of a secondary entrance. The primary entrance that will be used for the doggie daycare or the animal boarding and care facility is right here where number one is. Under the master plan highways and transitways, the applicant is required to dedicate 75 feet from the center line of the pavement along Alney-Laytonville Road and 35 feet from the center line of the pavement for Zion Road. As far as improvements, The bicycle master plan and complete streets guides are required that Olney-Laytonville Road have an 11-foot wide asphalt sidewalk with a 15-foot wide street buffer with a reconstructed swale, a two-foot wide maintenance buffer, and a seven-foot wide frontage zone. Zion Road is required to have a six-foot wide sidewalk with a 15-foot wide street buffer with a reconstructed swale and a two-foot wide maintenance buffer. So again, what staff is doing is doing away with requirements for all the frontage improvements, so just the dedications. And by requiring the dedications, we're making sure that it meets the master plan conformance It accommodates the frontage improvements for the future. It also is allowing the location of drainage swale in the actual right-of-way. And finally, the most important thing is that the property doesn't actually go out into Zion Road. It pulls the right-of-way line so that Zion Road will actually be in the right-of-way and not on the property. So planning staff collaborated with the owner, like I mentioned, for the trip generation. Under the ITE trip generation manual, there's no specific land use determination for animal boarding and care or animal training facility. Therefore, they worked with the applicant, and the applicant utilized some data from other doggy daycares or animal boarding facilities to come up with the trip requirements. And it falls under the 30 new threshold, 30 trip new threshold. And transportation study addressed the LATR requirements. And we have a traffic exemption statement on April 8 of this year. So as I mentioned before, the property falls under the Upper Rock Creek Special Protection Area. DPS determined there is no water quality plan needed. They did a water quality inventory with a stormwater management concept plan. There was a forest conservation exemption issued on April 29th of this year that was for clearing and evasive species removal, including Bradford pears and bamboo. And then a second forest conservation exemption was issued on June 24th. for the conditional use. So for the findings, staff finds that the application conforms with the conditional use, the general conditional use requirements for conditional uses and zoning ordinance as conditioned. It also complies with the specific requirements for animal boarding and care facility. It's compatible with the Olney Master Plan. It also complies with Chapter 22A Forest Conservation Plan. and has an approved stormwater management concept plan, water quality inventory, and also has an approved fire department access plan. Staff is recommending conditions with approval be transmitted to the hearing examiner for the conditional use for animal boarding care facility. Thank you for your time. And we're here, as well as the applicant, if you have any questions.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Beal. Would the applicant like to make a presentation?

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, members of the board. Thank you very much for the opportunity today. I'm Stuart Barr with the law firm Lurch Early & Brewer representing the applicant. I would like to introduce the applicant team, all available to answer any questions from the board about this project. To my left, Ryan Holt, owner and operator of the proposed business. To my right, David Duber and Lily Duber, representing the applicant team. And hopefully virtually, I can't tell who's connected, but hopefully we have Jared Carhart, Cass Engineering, our civil engineer for the project, Laura Lagogarito, ZDS Architects, our architect for the project, Katie Wagner, Grove Slade, our transportation consultant, Martin Beam, our acoustical engineer, and John Marklin, our landscape architect. All of us would be very pleased to answer any questions about the project that the board may have. First, I want to thank the planning department for recommending approval of the conditional use. We really appreciate all of the time and hard work on this application. I want to emphasize how enthusiastic we are about this proposed business, and we are extremely excited to be here with you today to share the project and to move it forward. But in order to open the business, we have work to do on some of the proposed conditions, and we respectfully request your consideration of our position. Importantly, we submitted a detailed letter to the planning board on Monday addressing the transportation conditions. Rather than repeat everything contained in that letter, I would like to focus on a few key points and what we believe is a practical solution that both protects the county's interests and the viability of the proposed business. We are very optimistic that there is a reasonable solution available. And we respectfully submit that the proposed public improvement easement, which I will discuss, provides that solution. Before I address the specific conditions at issue, I would like to introduce Ryan Holt, the owner and the operator, who will talk about his proposed business, Paws and Play Dog Hotel.

Good afternoon. My name is Ryan Holt. I'm the owner of the proposed. Thank you. I'm the owner of the proposed boarding and daycare facility, Paws and Play Dog Hotel. I was born in Baltimore, but grew up in Montgomery County, where I went to Winston Churchill High School. I previously managed a dog boarding and daycare facility in Baltimore, and it was there that I not only found my true passion, but also realized there's a significant need for better maintained and better managed pet care facilities. During COVID, we unfortunately lost many boarding and daycare businesses as people stayed home with their dogs. And when restrictions lifted, many of those businesses did not reopen. And as a result, many of the remaining facilities have been operating at near maximum capacity. Unfortunately, that leads to a higher dog-to-staff ratio and, in my opinion, a lower quality of care. I have been a dog owner and dog lover my entire life. And most of my dogs have been somewhat high maintenance and not typical daycare pets. And as I searched boarding and daycare options for my own dogs, I often found that I was not completely comfortable with the level of care being offered given the additional attention my pets need. After experience working in the industry, I felt driven to create the type of boarding and daycare facility that I would want for my own pets. My goal is to provide individually tailored daycare schedules that accommodate a wide variety of dog personalities and needs. I want to maintain significantly lower dog to staff ratios, provide much more direct interaction between dogs and staff, and work closely with owners to meet the specific needs of their pets. We also plan to offer a pick up and drop off service to help busy schedules and last minute planning. We will provide 24-7 camera coverage throughout the entire facility, where owners can check on their dogs at any time, even in the individual rooms. And we will also have 24-7 on-site staffing, which is a feature I found is rarely offered in this industry. When I decided to start my own business, I began looking for opportunities in Montgomery County because this is truly where I want to live. I've lived in many other places, but Montgomery County has always felt like home to me. And after a long search about two years ago, we found what I believe would be the perfect location for this facility. Olney offers large, open, farm-like areas while providing convenient access to communities like Rockville and Gaithersburg. With our planned pickup and drop-off service, we could even serve customers in Bethesda and Washington, DC. And it has been a long two years getting everything prepared and ready, and it has been far more expensive and complicated than I could have imagined. I've had to hire a large team of experts and consultants, and I did not expect the road to opening this business to be so challenging, both legally and financially. Even today, after everything we have done, I sit here still somewhat uncertain about a crucial element of the facility. As a boarding and daycare business, our outdoor play space is critical to the quality of care that we can provide. And we have worked hard to maximize the size of our outdoor play yards while still complying with all applicable county requirements. In fact, that effort has resulted in some very uniquely shaped play yards to ensure that they satisfy the required setbacks from the property line. The dedication that is currently being proposed could potentially shift the property line that moves the required setback, which would significantly reduce or eliminate the usable size of our play yards. And without adequate outdoor play space, my business would effectively be unable to offer daycare services as planned, and the project would likely no longer be financially viable. That said, I remain optimistic that we can find a reasonable solution to this issue. I would greatly appreciate the planning board's support, both for this request and for the business as a whole. I believe this project will be a real benefit to the community by providing jobs and a much-needed service for many years to come. We are making a significant long-term investment in this facility, which is why we are going above and beyond by installing a water storage cistern, sprinkler system, and new septic system, even though the septic system serving the building already exists. We are committed to creating a high-quality, well-built, long-term business. This location was where I wanted to build my business. I also purchased my first single-family home in Rockville because I plan to stay in the area and operate my business for the foreseeable future. Again, I greatly appreciate the planning board's time and consideration. Your support means a great deal to me, and thank you for listening.

Thank you, Ryan. Mr. Barr, just quickly, can we just, what is the main issue? What are we, it seems like the, the dedication is the issue, right?

Absolutely.

So maybe we can go over again with staff. This dedication, it solves this issue of you put up there where the road sort of does this jig. Can we just go over what?

I'm more than happy to explain all that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I just want to get to the gist of it.

So just very briefly, as Ryan said, he's a local county product returning to the county, investing in an existing property, proposing to reuse an existing vacant commercial building. on a property that already has commercial uses that have existed for decades, starting a small business that will be a very high quality business, providing employment, and providing a needed service to county residents, all without any community opposition. This is precisely the type of project the county should be encouraging. I will get to the transportation conditions. The context is that properties in the AR zone existing special exception uses that have existed for decades, a nursery and a landscape contractor. Everything's existing, the buildings, the parking, the access, the utilities. For the animal boarding business, we just want to reuse one of the existing buildings and fence in a modest-sized play area. And then DPS has asked us to replace the septic system for that building. That is the scope of the project. There's no major redevelopment. There's no new buildings, no additions to buildings. no new access, minimal traffic impact, no traffic study required, no transportation improvements required. That was recognized as that there the county backed off of what initially were required transportation improvements. We would say that the potential imposition of those improvements was disproportionate and unfair to begin with, but we do appreciate the fact that they were removed. And no subdivision, no SHA comments on the project, and no subdivision or PLAT required. That is the crucial component of this discussion, Mr. Chair and members of the board. Why is the fact that no subdivision is required so critical? Because the county subdivision regulations explicitly require dedication as part of the subdivision process. Whereas under a conditional use application that does not involve subdivision, such as this application, those same requirements simply don't apply. Now, there is an APF finding, which I will get to. under the general conditional use standards. And there's also the finding that Mr. Beal referenced that the project must be in substantial conformance with the master plan. But that finding does not involve an explicit dedication requirement such as exists under the subdivision process. This case is not about whether master plan recommendations matter. Of course they do. The real question is how those recommendations should be applied in this case. We respectfully submit that implementation of master plan recommendations should be reasonable, proportionate to the impacts of the application before the board, and should not be implemented in a way that threatens the viability of an otherwise compliant and approvable use. As Ryan said, just to go through the context, as Ryan said, we have to have a play area. The outdoor play area is a fundamental operational component of the proposed business. If that component becomes non-compliant, the viability of the proposed use itself may be jeopardized. Given the location of the existing building, the play area is proposed in the only logical location, next to the building, and specifically, as Ryan said, configured to comply with the 200-foot setback requirements. That's why it has the odd shape that it does. In other words, the proposed exercise area was specifically designed to comply with the county's animal boarding and care facility standards. In fact, all of our proposed business and our proposed plans comply with all county conditional use standards and findings. But our otherwise compliant plans encounter serious problems when the county requests dedications. If dedication is imposed, which shifts the property line, then the concern is that the play area becomes noncompliant and may not be approved by the hearing examiner. The request for dedication in Condition 12 is for approximately three acres of our property. When asked to convey, and I generally agree with the history as discussed by Mr. Beal, although to be certain there is another side to the story, I'm not going to go through that. We are here today with conditions as proposed in our response. I'm happy to discuss the history, but I don't think that's beneficial to reaching a resolution. But when asked to convey the three acres of our property, our immediate reaction was one of proportionality and fairness. We struggled to understand how dedication of approximately three acres could be justified for a project involving only the reuse of an existing building and that complies with all county standards. Moreover, we asked ourselves, given that we are just proposing to reuse an existing building, a vacant building, and this property has long been used for special exception uses, what was the prior owner required to do when those special exception uses were proposed and built? It turns out that the same master plan right-of-way widths that exist today existed when this property was approved and developed in the 1960s, a 150-foot right-of-way for Olney-Ladensville Road and a 70-foot right-of-way for Zion Road. With those same right-of-way recommendations in place, Montgomery County approved the special exception uses and development that exist on the property today. No right-of-way dedication, no subdivision or plat, no public utility easements, no transportation improvements. Now, nearly 60 years later, we own the property, and we propose simply to reuse an existing approved building. At a minimum, we think it is fair to ask why substantially different transportation obligations are being imposed today when the same master plan right of way recommendations existed when the property was originally approved and developed. Now, while we had those immediate reactions, ultimately, we just want to be able to open this proposed business. And so we spent a significant amount of time trying to understand the dedication requests and working with the county to see if we could reach a reasonable resolution. The dedication requests appear to be based on long-term county planning objectives to acquire right-of-way, which, on the one hand, we understand completely. And we acknowledge, as Mr. Beal mentioned, that there is a very small portion of Zion Road that is not currently located within the right-of-way. At the same time, the dedications are not necessary to accommodate any imminent county or state transportation project requiring acquisition of the land. In fact, State Highway said that it doesn't have any comments on this project. The dedications are not necessary to enable operation of the proposed animal boarding and care facility. They are not necessary because the project is proceeding through a subdivision or record plat process. They are not necessary to make the proposed use compatible with the surrounding area. And they are not based on any identified public safety concern. Finally, the dedications are not necessary for an adequate public facilities finding. And I would like to spend one minute on that because planning staff has suggested that the requested dedication is necessary to support the required adequate public facilities finding. Respectfully, we do not believe that the law or the record supports that conclusion. As I said, the conditional use standards require a finding that adequate public facilities exist. We don't dispute that requirement. But by law, right-of-way dedication is not specifically listed as criteria to satisfy APF. And based on the record for this case, the question is whether dedication of approximately three acres of land is necessary in order to make the APF finding. Here, the property already has frontage on Zion Road and only Laytonsville Road. It already has established access, utilities, parking, public services, it generates This project generates so little traffic that it doesn't require a transportation impact study. SHA reviewed the application and stated it had no comments or objections. We obtained fire department approvals and well and septic approvals. In short, the infrastructure necessary to serve this conditional use already exists. Importantly, the requested dedication does not create a road, utility connection, access point, parking area, fire protection facility, or any other public facility necessary to serve the proposed use. Instead, again, the purpose of the dedication appears to be the preservation of land for possible future transportation projects that may or may not occur at some unknown point in the future. That is a master plan corridor preservation issue. That's a very different issue. from whether adequate public facilities exist today to support this conditional use. In fact, specifically when we asked planning staff how APF required dedication in this case, the response was essentially that staff could not support the APF and master plan findings without dedication. Respectfully, that response assumes the conclusion. The question is why. What public facility necessary to serve this animal boarding use does the dedication create? Stated differently, what APF deficiency exists today that is cured by dedication of three acres of land? There is not an actual APF deficiency associated with this application. Accordingly, we respectfully submit that APF is not a basis for requiring dedication here, particularly where the applicant is willing to preserve the corridor through a public improvement easement, which I will discuss in one moment. For all those reasons, and again, because the scope of the requested dedication appears disproportionate, to the impacts associated with this small-scale conditional use application, we respectfully submit that immediate dedication is unnecessary in connection with this conditional use application, just as it was unnecessary in connection with the county's prior approval of the existing special exception uses. So that would be our first preference, no requirement. But that said, we just want to be able to open this business. Long-term transportation interests, and we are absolutely willing to cooperate as long as it doesn't jeopardize the project. The real question is how those county interests can be preserved without jeopardizing an otherwise compliant project. Fortunately, there is a reasonable and practical solution available, a public improvement easement, a PIE. What's the difference between dedication and a PIE? Importantly, in this situation, a PIE doesn't shift the property line. The property line would stay where it is, which allows the setback to remain and the proposed play area to continue to meet the applicable setback and be compliant. Otherwise, there is little difference, although County DOT may disagree and will have the opportunity to speak. We believe there's little difference between a dedication and a PIE, but you don't have to take my word for it. In our letter, we cited two examples of instances in which the county has accepted a PIE in lieu of dedication. Just a couple quotes from some of those staff reports and planning board resolutions. Quote, the PIE affords the county the same level of access and maintenance capabilities that would be provided by dedications. Quote, the PIE provides the same function as would full dedication. Quote, staff and MCDOT do not object to providing a PIE instead of dedication due to the unusual circumstances. Quote, the PIE will have the same legal effect as dedication because both establish a perpetual easement for public use, and under both mechanisms, the underlying fee symbol ownership is retained by the grantor. There will be no practical difference between the proposed PIE and right-of-way dedication because the easement area will be the same size, in the same location, and used for the same purposes, and so on and so forth. In other words, members of the board, a PIE protects the same land and allows future roadway, utility, pedestrian, bicycle, and other public improvements to be implemented when and if they become necessary. A PIE also does not prevent the land from converting from a PIE to dedication later if it makes sense to do so. A PIE represents substantial conformance with the master plan. Master plan recommendations do not have to be and should not be implemented absolutely strictly. As I mentioned previously, implementation of the master plan of highways recommendations or any master plan recommendations should be reasonable, proportionate to the nature and impacts of the application, and should not be implemented in a manner that threatens the viability of an otherwise compliant and approvable use. Now look, I understand that all things being equal, when given the choice between dedication and a PIE, the county is going to choose dedication. But in certain cases, the exception to the rule needs to apply. And in this particular case, we respectfully submit that this is exactly the type of circumstance where a PIE represents a reasonable and balanced solution. A quick word about precedent, in case there's any concern about that. First, use of a PIE in other cases already exists and has happened, as we reference in our letter. So the precedent's already been set. Second, there are numerous unique circumstances associated with this particular application, which distinguish it from many other cases. And then finally, what about the precedent if we impose the proposed conditions? What precedent are we setting by requiring these proposed conditions? What message are we sending to our small business community when a small business owner seeking to reuse an existing vacant building is required to dedicate approximately three acres of land and pursue a separate variance process simply to open a business that otherwise complies with county requirements? IE cures the problem, which is why We proposed that solution in previous communications with the county and propose again on page seven of our letter. I'm not going to read the entirety of the condition. You all can see it there. But look, the applicant has no objection to requiring the PIE and related documents to be recorded within 90 days following issuance of the use and occupancy permit for the business. That requirement would be fully enforceable and would ensure that the county's long-term interests are protected. For these reasons, we respectfully request that the planning board remove or substantially modify condition 12 and substitute our proposed condition, as I mentioned, and remove condition number 13. Those are the most important things to enable this project to move forward. Now, I want to pause there, Mr. Chair, because I've addressed conditions 12 and 13. In our letter, I also discuss other conditions, which I'm happy to discuss now, or I wasn't sure if you wanted to discuss conditions 12 and 13 first and then talk about the other conditions later, or would you like me to address all the conditions now?

I'd like to get all the conditions, all at once, please.

When it comes, I'll be more brief on the other conditions. 15 and 16 essentially are reference the DOT letter, and as Mr. Beal mentioned, there was an updated letter on July 7th. There's been some back and forth with us and DOT on clarifying or trying to understand the letter and those conditions, but there's still some concerns. Number one, DOT is requesting a 10-foot public utilities easement along Zion Road. Respectfully, we don't understand the legal authority for that request, when we asked DOT for the authority, the answer was Chapter 50. Chapter 50 is the subdivision regulations. This is not a subdivision case. So we do not understand the legal authority for requesting the 10-foot public utilities easement. And it has the potential, if imposed, to complicate our project. So we respectfully request that condition to be removed. Number 2C is a tree buffer requirement. We asked for clarification on what the purpose of that was, where it would go, what it meant for us, what does it require of the applicant. We did get some clarification that evidently it's intended to be within the proposed dedication area, but we don't understand what that requires of the applicant, what that requires of us. And so until we get further clarification on the 15-foot tree buffer, it's difficult for us to agree to accept that condition. If we can get clarification, that would help. But in the absence of any clarification, we just can't agree to that condition quite yet. 4A is a Zion Road site distance evaluation. We did conduct a site distance evaluation for 108. This condition asks for additional site distance evaluation on Zion Road. As Mr. Beal mentioned, there are three entrances to the property, two on Zion Road, one on 108. One of the entrances on Zion Road is just permanently gated off. Our business proposes to use the entrance off 108. That said, the entrance off Zion Road does exist and is open. But our business does propose to use the 108 entrance. And we are not proposing to add any trips to the Zion Road entrance. This proposed condition says to conduct a site distance evaluation for any existing and proposed site entrances on Zion Road that add trips. All we're saying is we're not proposing to add trips. So we believe it makes sense to remove that condition. 5A is a storm drain study. Our project involves, as I said, the reuse of an existing building. It does not materially increase impervious area. And we don't discharge to the county public storm drain system. So we respectfully ask for that condition to be removed.

Go over that one again, please.

The storm drain? Yes. Okay. So we, again, the scope of our project, Mr. Chair, reusing an existing building, interior alterations to build out the animal boarding facility, fencing in a play area, and installing a replacement septic system. That does not involve any impervious area, any additional impervious area. So we just don't understand the need for the storm drain study. And then finally, the... 5B, SHA storm drain approval, again, SHA had no comments or objections to the project. So we just think the condition should reference that to avoid any confusion. And then finally, conditions number 17 and 18, I believe, are standard conditions, perhaps, that reference SHA requirements. There are no requirements. So all we're trying to do when hopefully we get to the permit stage is to not have to demonstrate that SHA had no comments or requirements. Please either just remove that condition or just add a note that says as of such and such date, SHA had no comments. That will make it easier when We're working with DPS zoning review to check off that item rather than have a back and forth on arguably whether we complied with conditions which don't even exist. So those are the conditions that we asked for the planning board's consideration to revise. And as I said, we just want a reasonable path forward. And that allows the small business to open. We're available to discuss. And we thank you for the time and respectfully request your assistance.

Thank you. CHRIS JERRAM, JR.: Yeah, thank you, Mr. Farr. With the planning staff and DOT, are there any ones that he just went through that we can just cross off or you have so that we don't have to get? Like, for example, though, the last 17 and 18, are there no requirements? I mean, what? As he went through, are there any ones that are like no need, trust, or should we just start ticking them all off, OK? Start at the top of the list. Or would you like to respond to the, have you seen this list before?

Yes. Yeah.

And did you guys talk through this list at all, that letter?

Right. Yeah, there's been a little bit of back and forth with the attorney there, yes. So would you like us to, I think one, I'll just say quickly that, make a couple of clarifications on the testimony that was just received. So on one hand, we require dedication. As you can see through the presentation, we've tried to be very flexible with this particular ask. It is a conditional use. It's not permitted by right. There is a higher standard for this use. It might be one of the smaller conditional uses, but it's not something that's permitted by right. there is a higher threshold to get to approval. Then I would say that there are two findings that are necessary for every conditional use that is approved in Montgomery County. One is substantial conformance with the master plan, which includes dedications as recommended by those plans. And two, it is adequate public facilities, including roads. Dedication is a part of the improvements that go into, in addition to LATR and everything else that goes into determining adequate public facilities. So we would say that, at a minimum, we've essentially stripped everything out except for the dedication, which we are continuing to require as part of this application in order to make the finding of substantial conformance and adequate public facilities. The examples that were provided also, there were exceptions made. They're typically made in more urban areas with more constraints. When there is existing development, properties, I should say, buildings might be in the way. There might be other constraints. We've made exception in areas where requiring the dedication would have a property fall below the minimum lot area, where it would otherwise not be able to be platted for development. It would essentially sit vacant. So we have made some exceptions there. We've never done it for a road. The examples that were provided were also for additional improvements, like sidewalks or whatever other improvements would be in addition to a road, but at the minimum, I don't know that we have any examples where we have accepted a PIE for a public road itself. So in this case, we are trying to get the dedication for the road to ensure the long-term maintenance and improvements that may be necessary from MCDOT, who is the lead on the maintenance of those roads and facilities. Okay.

So before we get to that, I think that's the biggest thing.

Sure.

These other things, like this, I'm just trying to just, just so we can, this tree buffer requirement, you know, is that a big deal or, I don't know, is the, I'm just saying, are the, Are all of these other things just, I mean, are there, in terms of importance, Andrew, you think?

I think the easy ones are 17 and 18 with the SHA reference. There is an SHA email. So generally, we would include that. Even though the email says we have no comments, it's still accurate to say on condition 17, I would think 18, which says you have to do improvements subject to SHA, could go away. But I think 17 is appropriate because we do have a letter from SHA, well, an email from SHA.

I'm just trying to think what... I know, you're trying to get to the tougher ones.

So I think that we can handle that one.

So we can cut 18, keep 17.

And one of this tree buffer requirement, what is the, you said you didn't understand what that was. So can staff, what was?

It's for generally drainage. So when you have an open roadway section, the water has to drain somewhere. And so the 15 foot is generally for the drainage of the roadway. So it doesn't drain on somebody else's property. Can the 15 foot, depending on if they have 35 feet from the center line of the roadway, and if it's 13, so hopefully you get that drainage swale in the right of way. So that's what the 15 feet is for.

I'm sorry, go ahead.

Did I explain it?

No. So I thought it was something on site. So this is on a, so you can't have a tree, what?

So there's like, when you look on, if a road doesn't have a curb, it drains to the side of the road. And generally, that's where that is. It's nothing more than an area for the road to drain, basically. Usually, it's a swale. In this case, they call it a street buffer. It's a street buffer with a swale. So if it falls within that 35 feet of the center line, which is what we were asking for, then it would be within that area.

So if a tree falls within 35 feet of a center, I'm trying to understand.

If the buffer area falls within the dedication, then it would be within the dedication is what MCDOT is trying to say.

For the record, this is Richard Brockmeyer of the Transportation Planning Division. So I believe that 15-foot buffer is part of the dedication request. It's part and parcel. But if you dedicate the space that we have requested, that can fit the swell.

What does that mean for us? What does that require of us to do or not do within the 15 feet?

It does not require anything. As we have coordinated and discussed earlier, we're not requiring construction. All we are asking for is the dedication that can fit that swell and a future sidewalk if and when somebody can construct that.

OK. And presumably, that could also be satisfied by a public improvement easement, that same tree buffer.

Because something is not being constructed, there's nothing that can go in that easement. I think that's the primary issue.

We don't have to put anything within that 15 feet within the PIE.

No, I think the issue is the MCDOT will not accept a PIE public improvement easement without something actually being there for them to maintain.

In the areas that we have accepted a PIE in lieu of dedication, which is the requirement, there has been a physical improvement. When there is not a physical improvement, there is no justification for a PIE.

The PIE is there to enable future improvements if the county wants to install them. That's the same purpose as requesting dedications.

No, that's not the case. In this case, actually, we're trying to get dedication for a road to be in public right-of-way, and it's not. So that's the actual issue here.

Yeah. OK. So all of these are about the do you have public dedication or not. So my piece here, one in this, so a DOT. So any time you touch a property, someone is asking for a public improvement easement. The applicant is saying, I'm not doing much to this property. Why am I creating a public? Why do I have to dedicate? Like even if I, I don't know, and we're saying.

So as has been mentioned, part of the findings for conditional use is substantial conformance with the master plan. The master plan of highways and transitways identifies what the right-of-way widths, the minimum right-of-way widths are for these two roadways. All we are asking for is to meet the master planned right-of-way widths on their share of that road.

I'm trying to make sure that I'm following along. And that puts them within the 200 foot setback requirement. That's no longer 200 foot.

My understanding is only on Zion Road is that an issue. Only on Zion Road.

Yeah, it doesn't seem as if that's an issue with only .

So there's a 28 acre property. And where they are choosing to locate the outdoor play area on a 28 acre property is creating an issue with the dedication.

Or vice versa. But isn't, though, the play area, I'm just trying to figure it. The play area wants to be around the building, correct? I mean, isn't the play area around that you open the door? Let me see that. Didn't you have the screen thing that the play area is

That is the configuration we've proposed based on a compliance with the 200-foot setback required by the county's conditional use standards for animal boarding.

And where is this related to the whole where the road is?

From there, if you go further to the upper right, then you are towards Zion Road.

I don't kind of see it. Okay, so if you had to do the dedication, how would that site, I mean, is it encroached five feet into that fence area, 10 feet into this fence area?

The request is for 35 feet from the center line. And effectively, if we did dedicate 35 feet, it would wipe out the play area.

Just to be clear, they could seek a variance for the setback.

Which is unnecessary if we're allowed to do a PIE.

DOT will not accept a PIE for a roadway. We were simply just asking to try and get the roadway and the drainage area for the road in right-of-way. Right-of-way is separated as an easement is not. So an easement is just... over the property lines, whereas right-of-way is completely separated.

OK. So on this side, so you will have an easement on this side of the property. On this side of the road, it would be one side you're creating, they're dedicating on their side, correct?

Well, what do you mean by that, Mr.

Chair? So from the center line of the road

On your side of the property, you're dedicating that to whatever. That's the request, but that creates the problem.

No, no, I know this creates the problem. In the future, if you...

I think I know what you're asking. I think the answer is to the north and south. The road is within the public right-of-way. This is the portion that is not. And so we need the dedication here so that the entire road, but maybe that was not what you're asking.

And maybe you're talking about the opposite side of the road, if and when. I don't have the plat in front of me, but we would require the dedication on the opposite side. That's how we typically do it, is with the frontage for the property, that's where we get the dedication for their share of it. And if we need additional dedication on the other side at some point, we would ask that when that property comes in for some sort of application.

So you only get dedications when that property wants to do something. Suppose you wanted to put drainage on both sides of the road, just because you thought it was the right thing to do. How would that happen? You would just go to the adjacent property owner and say, you must dedicate 15 feet, 35 feet?

The county would have a CIP process to go and get an acquired right-of-way or an acquired easement to do that work.

They would have to essentially purchase that property, right? Or they would have to acquire the property.

They couldn't just do it. Either through development or the CIP.

Okay. So this has nothing to do with their property going into being the road inside their property. Is that part of it too?

This would resolve the fact that part of the road is not currently in right-of-way. This dedication would resolve that issue.

But the reason why we're asking for it is because of they're doing something on-site, their property, and you're thinking it triggers this, right? You're saying?

Yes. It's standard practice for conditional use that we look for, especially with the master plan conformance requirement finding, that we get the dedication.

OK. And this does not necessarily mean that the applicant can petition for a variance in order to keep their poles fencing wherever they want? Yes, the outdoor play area, it's fenced in, yes. And what is the likelihood of that happening, you think?

Staff would be supportive of that.

That's what I wanted to ask. I mean, I think it comes down to the setback of being 200 feet, which is a long, it's a large setback. But it is what it is, and the AR is not one that we can do. But is there a way that we can encourage or support with either the hearing examiner, or I think I mentioned the Board of Appeals, to do the variance, to support the variance for the thing? Because I think it's a reasonable thing to ask. 200 feet is a large setback, and it can accommodate both the... exterior play area, the dedication for the right of way for the road, which I understand, and still be fairly far away from any other property line. I think the real issue here is that the 200-foot setback for any zone is pretty excessive, honestly. But it's not something we can deal with today on a broader basis. But on this one, I'm fine to very much heavily support and encourage the hearing examiner and the Board of Appeals to allow for a variance on the setback, given that I'm sure you've gone through plenty of looking at where the best place for the conduct of the business is to have the outdoor play area. If we can do anything to encourage that, I think it solves most of the rest of the problems.

I would agree with you. We're all about getting new businesses to... I want this owner to have his dog daycare business and Because we want small businesses to succeed. And I would like the board to do everything it can to make sure. And we also want to follow our rules for dedication to roadways. And I want to do everything we could to support both. So if there is a way that we can show that the board really, really wants some leeway here for them to have an efficient layout around for this dog play area. That's what I would want. And we want to minimize red tape. But I also want to support this dedication. And I think a lot of these, Mr. Barr was around this dedication and PIE. My recommendation is to support staff's recommendation, but at also the same time with the board to make a recommendation to some leeway on this 200 foot.

Mr. Chair, can we have a quick conversation about the timing, please?

Yes.

Because it's not just the mechanism, it's the timing that are so critical. OK. As currently proposed, we can't pull a permit without the variance approval. Play this out the way it appears to be going. If dedication is required on Zion Road, then we have to, then we cannot fence in our play area without potentially a variance. But why can't we pull a building permit for the interior alteration to convert the existing building to the animal boarding? That has nothing to do with the play area. So what do we have to do to do that? So if we're not going to get a PIE, and I'm not going to continue to argue for that because it doesn't appear to be successful, even though it just seems like such an obvious solution that satisfies everyone. The timing. Can we not connect the variance to issuance? Just let us pull the building permit. Why do we have to get the variance before that? We have interior alteration work to build out the interior. That does not have to do with the fencing of the play area. Additionally, critically, if there 108 is required to be dedicated? That takes years. I am not exaggerating. When I've handled a dedication to the state, 108's a state highway. It takes years. Do not ask me to explain why, but that process, the last time I did it was for Montgomery Hospice. They had a small sliver of property that they had to dedicate on their state road, and it was multiple years. The way this is proposed, it says we can't pull a building permit until we dedicate 108. Why should we have to wait years to pull our building permit? Please do not make dedication of 108 a condition of pulling the building permit. If we're not going to get a PIE on 108 and it's required to be dedicated, please make that a post occupancy condition that we will dedicate 108 and dedicate Zion. Those should both be after occupancy. If that's the requirement, we'll dedicate both after occupancy. And then if required to do so, we'll get the variance or ask for the variance for the fencing. But the timing, we will have to agree to dedicate if that's the direction we're going. But please make that after occupancy. And that is totally enforceable.

Yeah, just really quick. In all of our conversations, we didn't think 108 was an issue. And I don't want to put words in your mouth. I thought you said 108's not the issue. Zion Road is the issue for dedication.

But the timing is, Patrick. If we can't pull a building permit until we've dedicated 108, and that process takes years, then we are delayed from pulling our building permit until that process is completed.

The initial offer on – I mean, I don't want to go too much into this, but the initial offer from you was by UNO that you would do it.

After UNO, correct.

It wasn't after. It was prior to UNO. No, we've never – Well, I would suggest, strongly suggest, that we not put – Just dedication, whenever you can get around to it, is not a great position to be in. Otherwise, it'll likely never happen. That's not true. So we would need to put some type of timing on so that this would be enforceable at some point.

So what timing would you recommend?

It's awkward to allow a permit to be issued for something that's not going to meet the standard. In terms of an outdoor play area, I mean, we really think that the variance needs to be granted for that particular construction to occur. I think, I'm looking at my staff, I think we're less concerned about, yeah, for the variance to occur. I think we're less concerned about the existing structure being rehabilitated and getting work done on that, but I think we would need some type of action or indication that the location of the play area and the fence would be acceptable before they would begin construction.

But I didn't think he said, I mean, he said to pull a building permit. He didn't say, you can't have, you can't run this, you can't have an outdoor play area, you can't have a dog thing, right?

Can I ask it?

I don't know. Hey, this is Jared Carhart with Cast Engineering. We have to pull a fence permit with DPS. Could we somehow tie this to a fence permit issuance?

So again, Mark Beal for the record, you're going to have an interior renovation permit commercial for the building itself. That's one permit. Jared hit the key note, what I was trying to say a few minutes ago. You will get a separate permit. It will probably be a commercial miscellaneous permit for the fence. I would not have an issue with saying that we can change that condition to, I mean, sorry, I'm not trying to go above people's heads, but I'd like to say maybe we change that condition to say prior to the issuance of the play area fence permit, That's done. The variance is done or whatever. Because you're not going to renovate that building in a month or two. There's a lot of work there.

I was going to ask on the condition. The condition 13 has alteration building permit or building permit for the exercise area fence. I think what you're potentially offering is to make conditions 12 and 13 conditional upon the building permit for the exercise area for the fence. Is that right? Am I getting that correct? So they could go ahead and continue to do the interior alteration? That's correct. Yes.

I think we're mixing two different things, though. I'm focused on condition 12. Okay. which says that before we can pull a building permit, presumably for our interior alteration work, we must first dedicate both roads.

That's why I was saying, yes, 13 has alteration building permit or building permit of the exercise area. And what I was suggesting was a building permit of the exercise area be the conditional thing for both conditions 12 and 13. So instead of building permit, we limit it to the fence permit. Is that something that's reasonable for those with the dedication in the... and the variance for that to allow for the interior work to start?

Yes, I would say the interior work can start with that permit, and then the variance for Zion Road and the variance would need to be done prior to the fence permit.

For the building permit for the exercise fence, and that would condition upon the exterior work can be done. Okay, I think that's fine.

I think I, can you? What is the proposed condition?

That's what I was asking.

Both 12 and 13 would say that prior to the release of any permit for the exercise area and fence, so 12 would then read, the applicant must provide the following dedications by deed, and then 13 would say essentially the same thing, that the applicant must obtain a variance through the Board of Appeals. for the setback being less than 200 feet. But the qualifier in each 12 and 13 would now be the outdoor play area and fence to allow you to move forward with the interior renovations of the existing building.

OK. Again, that process with the state could take multiple years. I'm just being direct. And I can't explain why it takes that long. All I know is I've endured that process. And I'm not exaggerating. So does that mean that we will not be, even if we get the variance, we will not be able to enclose our play area until we've dedicated 108 and that process can take years? That is not fair.

Rebecca from DOT. You could potentially have two triggers. One would be for initial before. So they submit the variance and they submit the deeds by a certain point. And then you do like, so the thing is, is that you want to make it complete. If it does take years, I'm not sure how long the state takes. I know they do a deed of donation. I don't know. I'm not sure if Kwasi's on. He might be able to answer. But they, but you could potentially keep your timing. And if timing doesn't work out and everybody's working judiciously to get things done, then you could let it, you know, continue. But

Are you saying to break the dedication out, like Zion Road from 108?

I'm not saying anything. All I'm saying is you could do two triggers. So you do the submission. So they don't submit it 30 days before they're trying, right when they're trying to get their occupancy permit, or right when the trigger is so that you don't have time to review it. My suggestion of you have to submit the variance or the deed by a certain time, and then you have to submit, and then you have to get approval. by another time.

Yeah, I think that we're trying to work with you. And so we may not have it all figured out. But the point is that you have submitted

Yeah. Can I just simplify this, though?

Rebecca, how long does it roughly take for a dedication by deed for Zion Road, which is a county road?

I know it gets- I don't know, to be honest with you. I've never done one, so I'm not exactly sure.

How about this? Can I just simplify? In order to pull the fence permit to enclose our play area, we have to get variance approval, period. That's all it needs to connect to, because it appears that we're going to need to dedicate Zion Road, which is going to create that problem. But as soon as we get the variance, we can pull the fence permit. There doesn't need to be any connection between the play area and dedication. When it comes to dedication, we want to pull our building permit. we will solemnly vow to dedicate. And the only question is timing. And we should not be delayed pulling our interior alteration permit to have to go through the state and county dedication processes when it's perfectly reasonable to time that to, with, again, our suggestion within 90 days of occupancy as a condition of approval, just like all the other conditions of approval that this conditional use must satisfy to operate. Or the worst case should be or would be as a condition of occupancy that the dedication. But then again, we're running into the problem of the multi-year process with the state.

So I think, and I'm asking for our attorney to help us here with it. But I think if you're making best efforts going through, I mean, you're going through a process. Yeah, Mark.

Can I make a suggestion? OK. Variance, follow me on this. This is going to be rough as can be, but it's just spilling out of my head. Variance by time of issuance of the fence permit. OK? Yes. Dedication for MCDOT, because that doesn't take two or three years like you're saying. Prior to occupancy. within X number of days of occupancy, something of that nature, okay? That can be enforced by DPS, Conditional Use Inspector. You got to keep that in mind because that's either one of a few things. That's a fine, that's a shutdown, that's you going to the board, not the board, the hearing examiner explaining why you're not doing it or whatever the process is at, where it's at, that sort of thing. The third thing would be is because on the Laytonsville Road, dedication may take two years, Let's put a time limit on it, whatever you guys want, whatever we all want to agree on. Is it one year, two years, whatever? Again, it's something that the conditional use inspector at DPS, they're going to shoot me for this, that they can enforce. And if it comes down to it, again, if you haven't done it, they can then give you a show of calls hearing. You go to the hearing exam and you explain where you're at in the process and why it's not done or what issues you're having or whatever the case may be.

Understood. And I think, I don't want to speak for Mr. Beale, but I believe he's essentially intending to enable permitting and building out the business to proceed in a timely way, but making sure that the dedications are enforceable, which they will be, and we have full commitment from the team to make sure those happen.

Mr. Beale, great. You have been a articulated an enforcement mechanism where DPS can, or whomever it does, can revoke the permit. I mean, I'm fine with that. Because, yeah, we just wanted to, and we wanted, I think this is a win-win. You get to move forward like you wanted to, and then you're getting the dedication of the road like you want to, but there's some enforcement if you don't do it by a certain time.

That's why we proposed within 90 days of occupancy. That's why we proposed that. Just about 20 seconds ago, but yes.

I'm saying, so just to clarify, we're striking 18, we're making 13 conditional for the issuance of the building permit, and we're using a post-90 days of occupancy for the dedication under condition 12. Is that, did I get all that, or did I miss?

Well, we would break... It would only be for 108. 12A would be the 90-day occupancy. Gotcha. We're saying within 90 days after occupancy. Is that what we're saying? Yes. Okay. And then B would be from the hearing examiner approval of the conditional use if she approves the conditional use.

Fair enough. And splitting A and B under condition 12 for two triggers on enforcement .

So talk through it one more time so our legal team could get it. OK. So why don't you say it again, Mr. Beal.

Sorry. I'm trying to get the conditions back up. So let's get the easy one out of the way. 13, I can modify it to where it'll say, before the issuance of the building permit for the exercise fence area, the variance must be approved. Yes. A will be the dedication along Zion Road must be done.

One comment on that, Mark. I mean, that's really up to DPS whether they need a variance or not. We don't need to condition this.

With the dedication, they're not going to meet the required setback.

Right, but they could move the fence. You don't know if they're going to need a variance. Why would you condition...

Because they're not going to move the fence. They've already said they're not going to move the fence.

Well, they may change their minds in the future. Who knows what happens over the next year. I guess they'll have to get the variance if DPS says it doesn't meet it, won't they?

So, okay, how about this? The fence must meet the required 200-foot setback after dedication or the applicant must file for a variance or obtain a variance prior to the fence permit issuance. Does that work? That way it's an or situation? Okay. Okay. And then... Barry said the Zion Road one, and then the Laytonsville Road one is within two years after approval from the hearing examiner, the dedication will be completed on Route 108 on E. Laytonsville Road.

Two years after the UNO, is that what you said?

I was saying after hearing exam and approval.

Two years after that is when they're going to dedicate Zion or 108? 108. 108, OK. So where does Zion fit in?

And then Zion is happening at UNO. Zion would be within 90 days after use and occupancy. You're not holding up the project. They're able to keep moving. They're able to get open. They're able to occupy. More than likely, if something's not being met with one of those last two requirements, DPS is going to do a show calls, go explain where you are, and just, I mean, start what you've been through before. Go through the process. Say, here's where we are in the process. We're working towards it. Usually, a hearing examiner will say, you've got another 90 days or one year or whatever the case may be.

Mm-hmm. I mean, look, as I said, we just want to open the business. And if we're able to open the business, I will turn to the team and say, we need to dedicate Zion Road. Like, that's the next thing we need to do. And we just want to open the business. Right. In this case, you can't. Right. OK. What about the PUE? I'm sorry to bring it up, but that complicates our lives. Do we really need a PUE?

and the reason

I mean, it's just general standard practice. We require PUEs on any property. You can remove it if you choose to. I would just, if there's a way.

It doesn't impact, I mean, the variance or anything else. I mean, that doesn't impact setbacks, PUEs. No, it doesn't. It's in addition to the dedication, but it doesn't affect setbacks.

And it's typically imposed in subdivision. Yeah, it is. That's where the legal authority derives from.

It's subdivision, and they were dedicating. So if you want to remove it, you can remove it. Generally speaking, I believe we do ask for these requirements for all conditional uses. So solar requires these kind of questions. You can remove it if you wish to.

Well, it is. Generally, is it, I mean, do we see it along these pages? Okay.

Okay.

Clarification that the PUE is just contained within MCDOT's letter, which is by reference incorporated as a condition of approval, but we do not have a condition of approval that explicitly says the PUE in our condition set. So it would be something that needed to be modified in the MCDOT letter.

Right. That condition... Condition 15 references the DOT letter, and so it should carve out that requirement in condition 15.

I can remove the condition. The SHA comment was just, going back to that other question, it was just a standard comment. And if the SHA has already said something, but generally speaking, when we write our letters, if we don't have that comment or anything, we just keep them in there, and then they can be addressed when they go to permit. So if you choose to remove the SHA comment, that's fine as well. DOTU is just providing our standard comments.

Well, I think it's best to, you know, the more you can remove before you go to have another. If you're saying you can remove it.

It depends on when we receive the comments. And I'm not familiar with when we received that comment from SHA. Okay.

So you're saying it's OK to remove it? Yes, you can remove it.

It didn't really mean much anyway.

So remove, what's it, 18?

Do we just want MCDOT to modify their letter or modify our condition? I think it would be easier to modify the letter.

Yes, I would not recommend the board do anything. DOT has acknowledged that they're amending the letter for a couple of conditions.

You're going to amend your letter? Yes.

OK, thank you.

Are you able to strike the site distance evaluation?

The site distance is required per all existing and approved. And that's a question I had asked planning. I thought that that was allowed per the conditional uses. We make sure that they do meet site distance requirements so that they're safe to the site. It doesn't matter if you think your people are going to use it or not. It's all contained within the conditional use, and we ask for that site distance. It is a safety measure.