 We will bring the Planning Commission meeting of January 13th, 2022 into session. Welcome to Planning Commission members, staff and guests. We ask for your patience during this meeting. Multiple staff members are here and behind the scenes with us today. We have Lucinda Statler, Planning Administrator, Hope Hasty, Interim Zoning Administrator, Jonathan Chambers, Land Development Administrator, and Andrew Livinggood, Annexation Coordinator. If you're watching the meeting via City TV, you will see live images or still images of Planning Commission members and the administrators. However, images of the applicant and the public will not be visible. Today, public participation will be heard here in person or via email by those watching on City TV. When participating, please provide your name for documentation purposes. The public may stream the meetings through City TV, accessed at www.youtube.com. slash user slash Columbia SC government. The public may submit letters and statements via email to COC board meeting at ColumbiaSC.gov leading up to and or during the meeting as this account will be monitored during the meetings. Emails and letters sent during the meeting will be read into the record. Emails or letters received prior to the meeting have been forwarded to the commission. The public may participate via phone. You may call 855-925-2801. When prompted, please enter the meeting code 2292. If you're here today to speak in person about a case, you must speak up when the chairperson calls for public comment. And I will go ahead and call the roll. Davis. Mr. Hart. Here. Ms. Hart. Ms. James. Oh, sorry. Sorry, she's sorry. Mr. Tupper. Here. And Mr. Frost. Here. We have a quorum. Here's a brief review of the meeting format. Applicants with requests before the planning commission are allowed at a presentation time of 10 minutes. This time should include but is not limited to an overview of the project, case history, and any pertinent meetings held regarding the request. This time also includes all persons presenting information on behalf of the applicants such as attorneys, engineers, and architects. This time limit does not include any questions asked by planning commission or staff regarding requests. Members of the general public are given the opportunity to address their concerns and intervals of two minutes. The administrator has a timer and will make presenters aware of when their time has expired. The planning commission reserves the right to amend these procedures on a case-by-case basis. The planning commission uses the consent agenda to approve non-controversial or routine matters by a single motion and vote. Examples of such items include approval of site plans, annexations, and street names. If a member of the planning commission or the general public wants to discuss an item on the consent agenda, you must speak up after the consent agenda is read. Then that item is removed from the consent agenda and considered during the meeting. The planning commission then approves the remaining consent agenda items. Read through the consent agenda. And I think we'll hear it as well. The first item is approval of the December 6, 2021 minutes. And then there's under future land use map amendment, zoning map amendment for pending annexation. Case number two is 819 Skyland Drive. This is a request to annex the property and assign a land use classification of urban edge residential large lot and assign zoning of residential single family large lot district at the time of annexation. The property is currently classified as mixed residential high density and zoned RSLD by Richland County. Case number three is 626 Sally Baxter Road. This is a request to annex the property and assign a land use classification of urban edge residential large lot and assign zoning of residential single family large lot district RSF1 at the time of annexation. The property is currently classified as mixed residential high density and zoned RSLD by Richland County. Just click through these rules. Okay, we've heard the consent agenda. Is there anyone from the planning commission that would like any item removed from the consent agenda? Is there anyone from the public either in person or watching on live city TV that would like to have an item removed from the consent agenda? If so, please speak now or send an email. When participating, please provide your name for the minutes. Please communicate by sending an email to cocboardmeetingat columbiasc.gov. Please communicate via phone by pressing star two to leave a voicemail or star three to speak in person. We will pause to allow communication from the public. The phone number is 855-925-2801. And the meeting code is 2292. I'm sorry, I had some callers earlier, but I do not have any callers up there. I don't have any emails that have come through. Okay, so no emails and no callers on the line. At this point, I will entertain a motion on the consent agenda. Got a motion to approve. Can I get a second? Got a motion and a second. All in favor, please signify by saying aye. Any opposed, say no. The ayes have it. The motion is approved. We will now move on to the regular agenda items. And since we don't have any regular agenda items, we're going to move right on to other business. And y'all may or may not, I think y'all know Lee before. She's our comprehensive planner and she's going to give a... Thank you. Hey, guys. Hello. Happy Thursday. So I think y'all have all heard me talk about Columbia Compass before, so I know you're excited. But I wanted to just give a quick refresher. So Justin, if you can move the slides forward. So Columbia Compass is the city's comprehensive plan. It's the update to the comprehensive plan. We do a 10-year update at least once every 10 years. And it was adopted in August of 2020, which I know both seems like just yesterday and years ago. So just a quick refresher. That comprehensive plan does cover nine elements. So the elements that you see before you, population, natural resources, land use, transportation, housing, community facilities, cultural resources, and economic development are kind of the core pieces of the plan. And then the priority investment element is that element that wraps it all together, which is talking about implementation. So that's kind of what I'm here to update you guys on tonight. Before I move forward, though, I do have to note, shortly after we released the draft of Columbia Compass in 2020, in March of 2020, which definitely feels like forever again. And you all saw the state adopted an act that not only created an office of resiliency, but also added the requirement to add a new element to the comprehensive plan. So there is now a 10th element under state law, the resiliency element. And we'll be addressing that probably within a brief update in the future, because we do talk about resiliency a good bit throughout the plan. But just to let y'all know that that is coming. What was the 10th element? Resiliency. So the Office of Resilience is tasked mainly with flood recovery efforts and kind of the coastal flooding issues that they've had. But they're also tasked with administering that statewide. And so we've met with the Office to talk about what that might look like in a comprehensive plan update as well. And can y'all hear me OK? It's hard to add. Yeah. Oh, there we go. OK, so this process graphic was developed as we released the plan. And so to just give you a fun, graphical version of where we are, we're at step number five, where we're reporting on the plan. So we're measuring our success annually. We do anticipate bringing you some revisions to the plan in the relatively near future. Because of course, as with any document, as soon as we start using it, we realize, oh, shoot. We missed something here. We need to daughterize, cross our tears, that sort of thing. So we'll bring you some updates in the future as well. But I do want to recognize one of the reasons this graphic is circular is that the planning process is really a circular process. It's a continuum. So as we're working towards implementation, we're still going back and planning and collaborating and defining how we're going to act as we move forward. So it's not just a straight line. And the reason I'm here tonight is also one of the reasons we put a very specific recommendation in Columbia Compass. And this recommendation is really about making sure that we benchmark our progress. So it's a little self-serving, right? But when we started the planning process in 2018, one of the things we struggled with communicating to folks from the public and to y'all was what we had done in the past 10 years, what we had done to really implement the prior comprehensive plan. So one of the great things about reporting annually is that we won't have that problem again. And it's also been a really great way for us to kind of keep tabs on things that are going on citywide that we might know about tertiary early. But I can tell you having put this together, I am so excited about all the implementation the city is taking on right now. So let's see if this remote will work. So that being said, it has been a weird year. And it's not been a full fiscal year that we're reporting on. This is a FY 2020-2021 report. So it was adopted in August after the fiscal year started. But even with that being the case, we've seen 68% of the recommendations move forward. So that's 85 out of 125 of the recommendations of the plan that have seen some progress. Most of those are the high priority recommendations, but a number of them are in the medium priority or low priority recommendation categories as well. So either they were things that some of those needs shifted, some of those, I mean, some of the implementation I'll talk about later is specifically tied to the COVID response that the city has taken on. So it's pretty exciting to see that many recommendations move forward. And one of the things I do want to note because I expect you'll get home and you'll be so excited. You'll just want to read the whole plan report cover to cover this evening over dinner, is that there are a number of recommendations that you'll see marked as ongoing. So you'll see that clock that's on the screen throughout as a status report. And there are a number of reasons for that. In some cases, that ongoing means that we've completed one thing, but we know that there are other things that we can be doing. So really to be fair to implementation, we know that a lot of these recommendations are ongoing throughout the 10-year life of the plan, that we're going to continue implementing if we just did things as a one-off and then didn't adopt them into common city practice, it would be, we would just be doing it name only, it wouldn't be very helpful in the long run. So a lot of those are ongoing, but that's not a bad thing. And I just want to make sure y'all are aware of that. So I want to go over a little bit on how to read the report. It's pretty straightforward. It does mirror the priority investment element of the plan, so you guys are familiar with that. But there are recommendations that were pretty easy to summarize. So they just had a tiny little paragraph, a sentence or two, or maybe they didn't even need a paragraph to say that they were underway, we were working on them. Some benefited from a little bit more graphically, whether it was a map or longer paragraphs, or maybe there were multiple things that we did that really spoke to that recommendation. So you get a sentence about one thing and a sentence about another. There are also the priority transportation improvements. So these were part of the transportation chapter and they were carried forward. They're not part of that 125 recommendations list, but they're projects, intersection improvements, corridor enhancements, corridor operations projects that we knew were probably going to move forward or needed to move forward in the 10-year threshold. So those are reported on as well as are some projects that have moved forward that weren't on those lists. So if you just need a quick primer on what's going on transportation-wise, these are the pages you're gonna be interested in. So just to highlight some of the successes because I think we went through the, like I said, there are 85 recommendations that are gonna move forward, but it picked out a few that we thought that y'all might specifically be interested in because of what you do and how you're engaged with the city already. So the first one is the UDO. So you guys had a huge part in this, right? Like the adoption of the UDO was a lengthy process and it went into effect this past August. August is 2021, still getting my years, right? But it hit the high notes for a lot of plan recommendations. So plan recommendations that were in the economic development section, that were in the land use section, that were in the cultural resources section, a lot of the things that the UDO moves forward when we modernize that code, when y'all went through that process, that will help move forward a lot of the recommendations of the plan from environmental recommendations like facilitating wetland restoration to thinking about how we're thinking about placemaking in our public spaces. There are set-asides that are part of the site plan requirements. So that's pretty exciting and that checked a lot of boxes for us and we know we'll continue to update it as needed. And then there's some recommendations, like I said, where there was one recommendation to optimize user experience, right? So people are users of city services from different avenues, right? They're water customers, they're checking board and commission agendas, they're watching y'all on YouTube, hopefully. So a lot of the things that we, there were a lot of different things that we did, especially in response to COVID and that y'all took part of patiently as we learned our new technologies and became more friendly to remote participation. So things like shifting to that Zoom and public input format, they hit a high note for us. They made it easier for folks to participate from home. We've also got an online permitting portal so folks can submit their permits online and that has been huge for contractors, not only when we were not necessarily open for face-to-face business, but also, now they just don't have to come in. Ford's shaking, he's like, yeah, it's been nice. So we understand that, so that's a great thing to celebrate as well. There are also a couple of state implementations that I wanted to talk about. So obviously when the state passes a house bill and an accident to law, they're not thinking, oh, we're implementing Columbia Compass, this is the most exciting thing ever. But they have done a number of things that really show you that there are some similar goals in mind and so the state recently passed a affordable housing incentive and so a lot of the projects that you all will see or have seen that are tied to affordable housing are eligible for low income housing tax credits that previously was only a federal program so that was only a federal incentive but the state passed GAP funding they're now state low income housing tax credits. So if you've seen an increase in those applications it's because there's more GAP funding available. So that's great because we need to incentivize affordable housing to get it built in the community. And there's also a DOT policy. So a little bit less directly related to some of the review that you do but you might notice as you review site plans on DOT streets and DOT is reviewing traffic studies and approving them, they now have a department-wide complete streets policy. So that actually means that they're looking at multimodal accommodations that are approved on regional plans and our Walk by Columbia plan which is a part of the comprehensive plan as well does have infrastructure recommendations for bikeways, pedestrian improvements and so on and those now have to be considered by DOT as part of that directive. So that's something to keep in mind and to be excited about as well. And that is pretty much it. I mean it looks like a hefty report but it should be fairly readable but I'm happy to answer any questions and then I promise listen that I would come back next month and if y'all wanna read and have questions we can ask or answer questions next month or in between. Is the plan for all of these recommendations to be done within a 10-year period or is that the goal? That is the goal. So we know that some of those recommendations may not start until year seven. For example, like we have recommendations in there that it would be necessary to complete one thing that's recommended before those could start. So sometimes we have low priority recommendations that are simply low priorities because we know the medium priority has to happen for the low priority to make sense to move forward. But yeah, the goal is that they move forward and certainly as we go through the update process we may see some shifting priorities. We identified when we were working on this in a report that there are a couple of recommendations that were listed as a short-term recommendation but they weren't listed as ongoing but it didn't make sense to like. I think one of those was to harness the city's buying power to reduce reuse and recycle. Well, it doesn't make sense to do that for three years and then not do it for year four through 10. Like that's so to shift it to ongoing. So I think we will see some shifting priorities and we'll see some edits like that in the future and we may see some things added and we may see some things removed because of how maybe infrastructure recommendations particularly might change based on larger projects that are happening. Good stuff. Thanks guys. Thanks Lee. Nice job. There's only one more piece of business today is office or elections. All right. Need a pen? Yeah. Thank you ma'am. Anybody else need, got one? So do you tally the votes here or do you just report back? Yeah, I can tell y'all here. Okay. It looks like Mr. Frost will continue serving as chair. Thank you all. And Mr. Conner will be our vice chair. Okay. Thank you. All right. So that can keep concludes the officer elections or is there any other business? No other business all except the motion we adjourned. Mr. Chair, I move that we adjourn. Got a motion. Can I get a second? Second. All in favor say aye. Any opposed? Meeting is adjourned. Thank you. Thank you.