 We're gonna have a second one. Good evening, welcome to the Durham Planning Commission. The members of the Planning Commission have been appointed by the governing bodies, half by the city council, half by the county commissioners. You should know that we're an advisory body, so any items before us are advisory, and we'll go toward the governing bodies for a final decision. If you would like to speak on any of the items that are in front of us this evening, we ask that you sign up at the table on my left on your right, and we have 10 minutes per side, 10 speaking in favor, 10 speaking against, and finally all motions are stated in the affirmative, so if a motion fails or ties, the recommendation is for denial. May we have the roll call, please? Mr. Commissioner Williams, absent. Commissioner Morgan has an excused absence. Commissioner Johnson. President. Commissioner Bryan. President. Commissioner Durkin. Here. Commissioner Alturk. Here. Vice Chair Hyman. Here. Chair Busby. Present. Commissioner Miller. Here. Commissioner Ketchin is currently absent. Commissioner Santiago. Here. Commissioner Bakers, excused. Requested in excused absence. Commissioner Low. Here. And Commissioner MacIver. Here. Great, thank you very much. Before we get into our business, I did want to extend a welcome to both Commissioner Low and MacIver. It's great to have you with us. If you'd like, you may take a minute to introduce yourself. We can start with Commissioner Low. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am David Low, originally from Wilmington, North Carolina. Been living in the Bahama area for the last 20 plus years. Presently served on the board of adjustments a few years ago. And I'm also a pastor in the AME Church. Beautiful church, Stony Creek AME Church, and Elon. Get an opportunity to come by and visit us. Thank you. Welcome aboard. And Commissioner MacIver. Thank you very much. Yes, I was born and raised in this area. And I just moved back here about a year ago. And I'm a designer and engineer in the area and looking forward to being a part of Durham's growth and hopefully make some positive change. Thank you very much. We will move to, actually, we have a motion to approve the excused absences, please. Yes, I was going to move that we have excused absences for commissioners Baker and Commissioner Morgan. Second. Properly moved and seconded. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Would you clarify the second, please, Commissioner Miller. And we can, I'm not sure about Commissioner Williams and Commissioner Canchin. They might just be running late, so we'll address that later in the evening if, for whatever reason, we figured out that they may have requested excused absences. I just can't find it in my notes. Great, thank you. We will move to approval of the minutes and the consistency statements from our July 9th, 2019 meeting. Any adjustments or a motion for approval? I move approval of the minutes and consistency statements as presented. Second. Moved by Commissioner Bryant, seconded by Commissioner Johnson. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. And Ms. Smith, any adjustments to tonight's agenda? Yes, Chair Busby. Staff would request two adjustments. The first adjustment would be to move under new business item A to the next action item before public hearings. That would be the resolution honoring Charles Gibbs. And the other adjustment would be to add item D under new business. We just need to discuss the October meeting schedule. I sent out an email about that today and I haven't heard back from everyone. I just want to take another stab at that and see if we can move that meeting day. Motion to adjust agenda as presented. Second. Motion by Vice Chair Hyman and I will give the second to Commissioner Alturk. It was close. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. Well, we will move to our first item, which is our resolution honoring Mr. Charles Gibbs, our colleague, former commissioner. And Mr. Gibbs, if you don't mind coming up to the side here, we have a resolution for you. I'm glad we moved it up. So you may leave us to the rest of our business. Let us know what it's like to be out on the Tuesday evening. You may not know, it's been a number of years since you've been free on this evening. I'm gonna read the resolution in full, but I did again want to just say that when I came to the Planning Commission, I was on the very end and Commissioner Gibbs was my seat mate and he would often lean over and explain to me what was actually happening in the meeting, which I appreciated because often it was lost on me in my first meeting or two exactly what was happening. And he's always been a good friend to all of us. And so I am pleased to read the resolution and appreciation of Mr. Charles A. Gibbs. Whereas Mr. Charles A. Gibbs was a member of the Durham Planning Commission from February 27th, 2012 through June 11th, 2019. And whereas the Durham Planning Commission and the citizens of the city and the County of Durham have benefited from the dedicated efforts that he displayed while serving as a member of the Durham Planning Commission. And whereas this commission desires to express its appreciation of a job well done, now therefore be it resolved by the Durham Planning Commission that this commission does hereby express its sincere appreciation for the service rendered by Mr. Gibbs to the citizens of this community and that the clerk for the commission is hereby directed to spread this resolution in its entirety upon the official minutes of this commission. And this resolution is hereby presented to Mr. Gibbs as a token of the high esteem held for him, adopted this 13th day of August, 2019. And I realize I need to sign this still. So I'm gonna run and grab my pen, but I will give you a moment. You have one, look at you. And the microphone is yours for any comments. Okay. Thank you so much, Chair Bryan. Or Mr. President, as I like to call you now and then. But anyway, those are some pretty impressive words for as much fun as I had on this commission. I'd like to start by, and that's not a forewarning of this is gonna be a long speech, but I do feel a sense of great gratitude to the Durham County commissioners who appointed me and the cooperation of the city council through the time that I've been here. I've always held the county commissioners in high esteem and what they did in appointing me helped me, I was in great need at that time. And you'll understand more when I get through with my remarks, but I was born in Durham, in Edgemont, which anybody that knows me if I start speaking of Durham history, Edgemont is going to get mentioned. And I spent my working years working for various architects in downtown, downtown Durham. I grew up around town, my formative years, my working years were spent downtown. Most of that time was spent working with Robert W. Carr architects. But at a certain point I felt like and I was there for about 22 years and I felt like I wanted to go and pursue some other things. Well, I ended up at Duke Medical Center where I was ADA and accessibility coordinator for 15 years. But as I went to work at Duke, anybody that's ever worked at Duke, it's like working in a foreign country. You sort of lose contact, or I did anyway, with the things that I grew up with and worked in for many years. And the few trips I made back to Durham to downtown, I could sense and see that the life was gradually ebbing from Durham. And that's the absolute truth. Those that were here at that time, you may not agree, but compared to what it was in growing up and working downtown, it was losing its life. I know it was not going to die, but there were some forward-thinking leaders along that time that of course saw the same thing but they were not going to sit back and watch Durham disintegrate to nothing. And all kinds of things were put in place. People were beating the drum for Durham and it's too good to let go, and it was. It's a historic, it was then historic and still is, but when I retired from Duke, I came back into downtown and I had missed an awful lot of things in downtown. My old contacts were either retired or retired. But I wanted to get back into some kind of active role in whatever I could do to help bring Durham back to whatever it was going to be. And I say that because it's now, the renaissance has, as everybody knows, has begun, but we have a different set of circumstances. We have new challenges. It's going to be a different Durham, but I think it's going to be a better Durham. And that's the thing that I missed is not being involved. And when I took my seat amongst this group of people here, that's when I knew I had jumped right back into the free. It's been an enjoyable time. I brought some things to the table, but it wasn't an inkling of what I learned and what I got from serving on this. And the contacts I've made, the people that I've met and to cut things short, I really feel good about the future. And staff is embarking on a small project of revising the land use, the COMP plan, UDO. And you folks are going to have a big part in that. And since there's nobody here much to speak to, I guess I'm addressing my comments to whoever is watching on TV. If you have some doubts or want to have some input and how you would like to see Durham progress, don't sit back and complain or sit back and be ignorant of what's happening. All of these people, these up here, the commissioners and the staff, especially, they are accessible and you do have a part in where we go from here. And I really envy what's ahead of all of y'all and even staff, I know it's gonna be hard work but it's going to, I think, send Durham into the right direction. I know there's some really talented folks up here and I hope you have, you don't mind speaking out and I know most of them don't find it that is. But, and I will close with this comment. I prior members of the commission left the planning commission and had some political aspirations and I'm here as my last comment. I do have some political plans. My plan is to run just as far away from politics as I possibly get. And with that, it hasn't, it has been a real honor to serve. I feel much better about Durham now that we're the capable hands of these people. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I move the resolution. Second. Properly moved and seconded. All those in favor say aye. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. Commissioner Kenshin has also arrived and Mr. Gibbs, thank you for speaking tonight as you served with, with gusto. We will move to our first public hearing and this is our only public hearing this evening. This is a zoning map change and it is case Z1900020 Leesville Road, boat and RV storage and we will start with the staff report. Again, if you would like to speak on this item please sign up in the public hearing sheet and we'll open the public hearing after the staff report. Chair Busby, real quick before we move on, can you confirm who seconded that motion? We were, we got lost. Thank you, Mr. Bradley. Good evening, I'm Jimmy Soniac with the planning department. First off, I would like to state for the record that all planning department hearing items have been advertised and noticed in accordance with state and local law and affidavits of all notices are on file in the planning department. This is Leesville Road, boat and RV storage. It's case number Z1900020. The applicant is Warren Mitchell. The site location is 4615 Leesville Road. It's located within the county's jurisdiction. The site is approximately 13.882 acres. The request is to change the residential rural zoning district to commercial general with a text only development plan. So that would be CGD. The site is currently designated under the future land use designation as commercial. So there's no proposed change to that. And again, it's a proposal for the text only development plan. Emily Struthers, I think at the last planning commission meeting went over in the slide in terms of what the text only development plan is. And so this slide kind of summarizes that and then also specifies the specific uses for this zoning request. So the applicant has specified the used to be self storage, self service storage, restricted only to boat and RV storage. In addition, there would be no development or uses of any type north of the riparian features on the property. This aerial shows the property in red. It is located within the suburban development tier in the Falls Lake Basin. And it falls within the Falls Jordan District Watershed Protection Overlay Zone. This picture shows that the property is heavily wooded. It contains a single family residence which is set back off of Leesville Road. There are overhead utilities running through the property. There's a number of riparian features that bisect the property. The topography maps show a significant great change with the property sloping north away from Highway 70. And the following two slides show some of the area in terms of their uses. There's a number of agricultural and residential uses as well as undeveloped land nearby along 70. There's really not a very good cohesive development pattern. There's scattered residences. There's some transportation delivery service uses, various businesses along 70. Also some undeveloped and heavily wooded areas as well. This slide shows the existing zoning on the left and then the proposed zoning on the right. Again, the applicant is proposing to change the zoning from rural residential to commercial general with a development plan. Here you see the future land use map designation with the property shown in the white hatched with the area as a commercial future land use designation which is consistent with the zoning request. So there's no change to that. This slide just shows the various CG district dimensional standards that the applicant or any property within that zoning district would have to adhere to. And then in terms of consistency with the comp plan, the staff finds the requested designation reasonable as it is compatible with the present future land use map. The proposed commercial general rezoning is compatible with the commercial general zoning to the south and to the west. As mentioned, there really isn't a consistent development pattern along 70. It's sort of a leapfrog development pattern. However, the text commitment that the applicant has proposed specifically limits this use to self service storage restricted to the boat and RV storage, which is essentially a new commercial business with a very, very low intensity and very low traffic generating use. In addition, as mentioned before, the applicant has committed to no development or use of any type north of their riparian feature on the site. And the staff report also indicates that there is existing infrastructure, such as roads, water and sewer to significant to accommodate any potential impacts. The staff determines that this request is consistent with the comp plan and other policies and ordinances. And I will be happy to answer any questions that you have. Thank you. We will open the public hearing and we have one individual signed up to speak for the proposal, Mr. Warren Mitchell. If you can give us your name and address and then share your thoughts. Thank you. My name is Warren Mitchell. 104 Amberwood Run Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I want to say hello and good evening to all the commissioners. I'm here with my partner tonight, my business partner, David Durham. We own the Highway 64 boat and RV storage in Apex. Even though we are fairly close to the lake, we have a lot of RVs there as well as boat customers. We've been running that for several years and we have customers really from all over the triangle. We thought the area around Leesville was good. We looked, we have a lot of tenants from Durham as well as Raleigh. This site we identified last year. It does have some issues. And one of those was identified in one of the commitments, no development north of the riparian buffer. There's two streams that bisect the property from east to west and with those buffers and the land north of the buffer that cuts out about 40% of the property and then there's a high voltage transmission line running through the property south to north. And what that yields is about three acres available of the 14 next to Leesville Road. The use of boat and RV is not a retail use like you've seen for some self storage where they want a lot of visibility. They want to be on a busy road. We do all of our leasing through the website and we do it by phone. There is no office. There will not be no office at this facility. The reason I think this area is not, you have not seen much development because it looks like the sewer has not been extended but you do have some residential projects that are getting extended further out this way but we will not have an office and have no need for water or sewer for our facility. The, as Jamie mentioned, it's very low traffic generator. We'll have one driveway off of Leesville into the project for privacy and security. The covered storage will have sides all the way around it and you will not see the boats or RVs from the road or from the adjacent properties. It is our plan to cover most of the sites, if not all of them. But any uncovered spaces would be internal and not exposed to the road. We did have a neighborhood meeting. It wasn't required because of the future land use map is not being changed. We did not get any folks to come to that meeting. That was held back in June. I think that's all I have for you tonight. I would be happy to try and answer any questions you might have. Great, thank you very much. And so we'll see if anyone else wants to speak in the public hearing. We may ask you to come back to answer questions. You've already answered a bunch of mine. So thank you. Okay, great. Is there anyone else who would like to speak on this item? I don't see anyone else. So we will close the public hearing and commissioners. Any questions or comments? We'll start to my right, commissioner Johnson and then commissioner Brian. Thanks, chair. I just have a quick question of this staff with the proposed change. It looks like there's a little box that'll be basically the rural residential zoning. And it looks like that it's all wooded at this point. I think this enclosed land parcel that would result from this change is am I accurate in that? And do you, to the applicant, do you know who the owner of that land parcel is? Yeah, let me identify the one you're speaking of. Oh, I see that person that owns that also owns the commercial north and west of it as well. Let me, well, wait a minute, no, okay, excuse me. They own the commercial zone. I don't know why that, it's one parcel actually. It's the lower part between that and 70 is zone commercial and that's zone residential, but it's the same parcel. And I did look at, there's two options for the highway 70 improvements. One will move, the north option will move up, almost touching our property and we'll go through that commercial, commercially zoned red, the red property. The south, of course, would move on the other side, but that person inherited that land. I don't know what's much more to tell you, but that little box of residential is owned by the, it's one piece with the commercial zoning. The quick follow up. And so are you aware if that property owner received whatever outreach you did for the community meeting, no one showed up, I heard you say. Yes. Do you know if that individual or a group would ever heard about it and any feedback or communications with that? I'm sure she received it, but I did not hear anything from it. She inherited the property. And I don't know what her interest is. Gotcha. Thanks. And before we move on, I know you had a question for staff. I don't know if you- No, it's just clarifying that it's wooded, yeah. Great. And I will just add just for the record that that property owner would also have been notified of this hearing too. Gotcha. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Commissioner Bryan. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Commissioner, I just wanna make sure I heard you correctly on a couple of points that you made. It's a 13, almost 13.9 acre site, but with the restrictions of riparian features and so forth, your storage area is really only gonna use about three of those acres, is that correct? That's correct. And there'll be no office there. The security seemed to me to be based on the fact that it'll be a fenced area and it'll also be basically out of sight from the redway. Is that? Well, we won't need a fence on this one because the building will create the fortress by itself. Oh, okay. Okay. And that would create the security. Okay, okay. But, and it'll be out of sight, basically. All the vehicles will be out of sight. There'll be a little driveway to drive in between the buildings. Mm-hmm. So, other than that, it'll be completely. So, when you say building, so these will be a garage just to park your boat? That's right. We have some with doors and some are just people back in and they're open. Okay. Both are desirable. So, may or may not have doors, but probably be both types. Okay. Okay. Thank you very much. Commissioner Alturk. Thank you, Chair. I had a couple of questions for staff. I guess the first is that the applicant said that these units would be covered and hidden from the adjacent property. The building itself will have sides that will hide all the vehicles. But that's not a tax commitment, right? We can. All right. We should base our decision on. Correct. The text-only development is, development plan is specific to use. It can't be to design criteria or building features. Right. Okay. I just wanted to clarify that. Thank you. The second question is, we usually don't get much about the utility statement application. You mentioned that in your, in the staff report. And why exactly did the Water Management Department decide that a summary, summary utilities statement was not required? The, my understanding is that the utility statement, the utility extension, there will be a utility extension agreement that would be required prior to the site plan application. And that would, and that would be going to council. It wouldn't be something that would go to planning commission. Okay. I see that in attachment seven, there's now stormwater impacts. Is that a, is that going to be a new addition to all of our staff reports? Say that again? The stormwater impacts. I see that there's a section in there on that. Is that going to be in all of them now? Yes. So staff has updated the development summary application, impacts attachment to include stormwater impacts, feedback from the Water Management Department. Great. Thanks. That's a, I think that's a nice addition. And then one minor comment in section E, you mentioned the IL zone, but I assume that's a typo. Correct. Yeah. All right. I should have mentioned that during the presentation. It's okay. Thank you, chair. Commissioner Miller. I have a question for staff. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And we show the map again, that shows the riparian features, just to make sure that we've been reading and talking about it matches my idea of what's on the map. So yes, that's good. Right there on the left hand map shows more distinctly. There are two streams that bisect the property coming together kind of in a wide sideways, wide shape. And it's my understanding that these are jurisdictional streams. They have three dots in the line. So is that a 50 foot buffer, riparian buffer? I don't know. There hasn't been a stream determination for these streams as part of this application because they're not coming in with the development as far as I know. Have you done a stream? I don't understand. What I'm trying to get at is, by looking at the map, how do I evaluate the portion of the property that they have committed to not build or develop on, I'm trying to translate it into the actual map. Right, so the... With these riparian features, that's not a term that is sufficiently descriptive to me. The riparian features that we are referring to in terms of the text commitment would be those defined blue line streams that are shown on the map. Right, and I was trying to find out, can we tell? So if it should be determined that there are no buffers required, would the commitment still be enforced? In other words, if the stormwater people come back and say, just ditches. The text commitment doesn't specify anything to deal with buffers. So my answer to you at this particular time would be that it would be limiting to no development anywhere within the area and north of those riparian areas if there was a buffer. So looking again at this map, there's one that cuts across, the southern or southern of those, that would then be the northern limit of development. Correct. Even if it were determined later through the process in the code, the administrative process and the code for that, if an engineer determined that these are not jurisdictional streams now and therefore could be eliminated, that the line on the map is still, because of the commitment, a development boundary. Correct. All right, that's what I was getting at. Thank you, that's a big help. Can you tell me what the buffer requirement would be for this use against the neighboring rural residential property? So adjacent to sites that have development, it would be a 0.6 opacity, which would be 30 feet. And adjacent to undeveloped land, it would be a 0.8 opacity, which is 40 feet. Okay. And so that parcel next to it, the parcel that runs the same depth, it's a little bit smaller. When I was out there, it's got a single family house on it. I couldn't tell whether or not it was occupied, but that's gonna continue to be a rural residential piece of property, and therefore on the applicants property, there would have to be a buffer. Correct. And it would have to be 60% opacity. 30 feet. And will that buffer have to be good run all the way the whole length of the property or just up to the point where the riparian stream cuts across? No, it would have to run the entire length of the property where it changes to the CG, the buffer would go to 40 feet, and then it would go back down to 30 feet where it hits the rural residential zoning district again. And under the zoning ordinance, they can use the naturally occurring plant material in the buffer as long as it achieves the necessary opacity or would they be required to beef it up if they were thin places? That would be determined at the time of site plan. But it's a determination that could be made then. Right, there is the option to have natural buffer. I couldn't speak to beefing it up in terms of that. I'd have to pull the landscape requirements to do that, to give you exactly what they would have to do if they were using the natural buffer. And then finally, with regard to the very interesting question that Mr. Johnson raised about the little yellow square on that same map, when I look at these maps, it looks like that parcel which runs along Highway 70 and joins Leesville Road cutting the subject property off from Highway 70 is shaped in such a way that it looks like it's one parcel in two zones where a place where the zoning boundary doesn't actually follow the property line. So that you wind up with one parcel, two zones, one being CG and the other one being rural residential. And we're gonna wind up, if we pass this rezoning, we're gonna wind up with a little square of rural residential. I'm sorry, I would agree with you that the property is split zone with a long, thinner piece. The frontage parcel. That runs along 70 is in the CG portion and then portion in the back is the rural residential. And then you've got the CG that surrounds that. That's allowed in the code and it can occur a number of ways. It could be that there was a change to that parcel. There's many reasons why this could occur. Right, but it's an allowable thing. It happens. We have a lot of properties throughout the city and the county that are split zoned. Split zoned, that's a good term. Thank you. Those are my questions, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Other commissioners, any questions or comments? I have a commissioner low. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Question of clarification. I believe I heard Mr. Mitchell say that the site will be covered. And are you speaking about the buffer? Is that the covering you're speaking of or actually about top? The units for the boats and RVs, they'll be covered or enclosed. They won't just be sitting out in the open or exposed to the traffic on Leesville or the neighbors. It will be, it'll have a roof and sides to the building. Thank you. Great, thank you. I have one additional question. I just wanted to hear your thoughts on the transportation side, especially looking at the NCDOT comments about US 70. And so that just adds a layer of complication and I was just curious about your thinking does that change anything long-term for your use of this property, especially with RVs and boats and getting in and out? No, it's actually possibly a good thing because we will be at the end of Leesville Road. So people coming in and out, there won't be possibly won't be anything else or maybe only one more thing across Leesville using Leesville at that point. Now, we're based upon the construction schedule of 2024. We will have been constructed and then going through Leesup. So we should be full before they begin construction on 70. So then you just, most of our tenants stay long-term for several years that we've seen. You have a little bit of turnover, when somebody leaves and then somebody comes but it's not a lot of turnover. So it's not bad at all. People are gonna know where, how to find us. You've seen probably a few of these combined with self-storage, there's not a lot of the covered nice facilities for boats and RVs and people once they get in, they tend to stay there. You're approving a lot of very small lots in all neighborhoods and all municipalities and people just don't have a place to keep them. Great, thank you. I know Commissioner Miller and then Commissioner Johnson had additional questions. So Mr. Chairman, if I may have a question for Mr. Judge about what the, or whoever. So yeah, those DOT, I'm glad you remind me of the DOT comments. So if Highway 70 becomes a freeway, is it possible that in the conversion of Highway 70 to a freeway that the connection to Leesville Road might go away when that's designed? It will absolutely go away on their plans. According to their plans, Leesville Road will be backfed from, they're gonna have a road going under page road extension. We'll go under or over 70 and then tie into Leesville. So you'd have to, but you still can't get on 70 there. You'd have to go all the way over to TW Alexander, either around Leesville or go under page road extension, get on page road and go to TW that way. It's not people that have boat and RV storage. They come get it at the most once a week, maybe once a month. Some I've seen been there two years and never used once. It just, it's not a high trip generator and getting in and out. We just don't see it being a big deal based upon our current operations. But I've looked at the traffic, I've looked at the maps and the access doesn't seem a problem for us. Thank you very much. And so, and that answers my question, but it stimulates me to make the comment that when I look at the future land use map for this area, and I don't know how easy it is to show that from, but it makes me wonder whether or not a future land use map that calls for the expansion of commercial with the intersection of Highway 70 and Leesville Road, when Leesville Road may go away, is actually good future land use planning. And so, and then that impacts my thinking on whether or not we ought to be rezoning property consistent with a future land use map that looks like it's going to create a commercial node on Highway 70 at Leesville Road, when we are also at the same time doing highway planning that's going to eliminate the ability of essentially the customer base from using any of this land without having to get off in one place and drive around through the country and then come back to it. So... If you don't mind, I can address that. Oh yeah, address that please. So there are also, in addition to the NCDOT roadway improvements that were just discussed, there's also the capital improvement plan that has new collector street planned that would run parallel 270 within this area. Like a service road? Well, off of, I don't think it would be called a service road. Darlene or Bill may want to speak to it a little bit more succinctly. However, there would be a road that would be planned that would run parallel 270. So there would be access to those properties that would still be visible from 70. So essentially, because I had this conversation with other staff members prior to this meeting in anticipation of sort of this question. And so the access would be still provided essentially making those properties still viable for some sort of commercial development. And can you show me on the map where that road might go on this map that we have here? This map, these maps don't show that, unfortunately. They don't show it, but can you indicate where it might go so it can understand what we're talking about? You see the Leesville in the Highway 70 rights of way and you're talking about a roadway that would run parallel. I'm envisioning it. It also depends on which way the 70 freeways is built. They have a north option and a south option. So it says if it goes south, then 70 will become that road. And then if it goes north, then it would just change where that road's built. So Earlene has a little snapshot on her phone that she potentially could show you, but... If she wants to be so kind. But essentially... We just wanted to stick with the rubber tip. Essentially it would run parallel to 70, sort of in line with where the commercial and the residential designation shifts. So this on the north side. Correct. And so actually instead of today when I run along Highway 70, and I'm on that side of the road, I can turn into the properties from Highway 70, which was generally to the south of the commercial properties. There we go. Uh-oh, here we go. Look at this. This is going to be so exciting. This is technology on technology. The, what will happen in the future if it's built as we've been talking about, I'll actually turn south into these properties from another road from this parallel facility. Bear with us here. Sorry. Well, I'm glad you mentioned this because this is what has been worrying me about this rezoning all along. Okay. Oh, there you go. That's her phone. And so that blue, is that dotted blue line the roadway that you were talking about? Correct. I get it now. Thank you. I get it. Well done with the technology. Commissioner Miller, any additional questions? No, I'm all done. Commissioner Johnson. Thank you. I just had a question for Mr. Mitchell in regards to the conceptual development of the site. Do you have a sense of how many spaces are that will end up on that? I think about the most we would fit is about 120 to 130. Any additional commissioners, questions or comments? I'll say for my part, I'm comfortable with this proposal and I'm prepared to vote in favor when a motion is made and seconded. If it's that time, Mr. Chairman, shall I make a motion? You may. Mr. Chairman, I move that in case Z19-00020, the Leaseville Road, Vote and RV Storage case that the Planning Commission send this forward to the Board of County Commissioners with a favorable recommendation. Second. Properly moved by Commissioner Miller, seconded by Vice-Chair Hyman. All those in favor, do you need a roll call vote? I know. I can do it quickly. Okay, we'll have a roll call vote. Commissioner Johnson. Yes. Commissioner Bryan. Yes. Commissioner Durkin. Yes. Commissioner Alturk. Yes. Chair Busby, sorry. Yes. Vice-Chair Hyman. Yes. Commissioner Miller. Yes. Commissioner Ketchins. Yes. Commissioner Santiago. Yes. Commissioner Low. Yes. And Commissioner MacGyver. Yes. I'm sorry, motion passes 11-0. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir. We will move to our new business and we're gonna start with our stormwater management presentation. And just a reminder to commissioners, we have begun having presentations on different pieces of our work when we have slower months on the agenda. So I appreciate the staff working with us to set these up, Ms. Smith. And we would like to thank Jennifer for taking time out to be with us tonight. She didn't have to do that and she was more than happy to do that. And while she's getting prepared, I'm gonna pass down what you may expect next month and just so you can have that while she's pulling up her presentation if that's okay. Great, thank you. Yes, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it. You're welcome. Okay, can everybody hear me okay? I'm kind of short, but I can't seem to get this thing to move any lower. So thank you very much for inviting me here tonight to talk about one of my favorite topics, stormwater. My name is Jennifer Buzin and I work for the Stormwater Development Review Group in the Public Works Department. Let's see, I guess I have it. Our group covers city stormwater review. So I wish to point out that this is for projects that are either within the city boundaries already or will be by annexation. We don't, county stormwater handles the stormwater review for county parcels. What is the purpose of stormwater development review? Well, it's basically to make sure that all development is in compliance with the applicable stormwater regulations and I will discuss in a while what those are and also to ensure that any stormwater control measures that are needed to help the development comply are adequately constructed and maintained. So let's look at things both from the developer's perspective and the city stormwater perspective. So first the developer decides, well, I wanna build this but my parcel isn't zoned for that and they go through changing a procedure to change the land use, which is well known to all of you, it's rezoning and we do look at things on my group does look at things during the rezoning process. Then comes, I would say the rezoning is way up here at a high level, then we lower the level a little get a little closer to the details, the conceptual planning, you will say a subdivision you plot out where the street's gonna go where the housing lot's gonna be. That's the site plan and we review site plans. Then once the site plans approved for the things that concern us, we have to see construction drawings and those give the details of how they're actually going to build the stormwater control measures. And those are CD review, that means construction drawing review and permitting. Then comes the actual construction process. We're not out there supervising construction every day but we do get involved in terms sometimes of building permit and certificate of occupancy issuance. Then comes the end of the project where the developer would want project acceptance and for us what that means is as built review and approval and the as builts are for the stormwater control measures that we have reviewed and required. Then after that happens, the project enters long-term usage and maintenance and the piece that we care about that for that stage of things is the annual certification for the stormwater control measure. You can't just build it and forget about it. You have to maintain it and you have to have it inspected annually. Let's see. Let's talk about rezonings now. What do we actually look for? And these are rezonings with a deep plan or a development plan. You've heard already about streams, lots of streams on the Leesville Road property. We do look at the streams on a rezoning and we make sure that the stream buffers are shown where there is a stream. As you know, planning also reviews that. We look at floodplain. Is there any floodplain on the property and if so, is it shown correctly? Stormwater control measures. Now very rarely will a developer going through a rezoning show us where they plan to put the stormwater control measures. I mean, they already have an idea, trust me, but they don't usually put that on the plan. If they actually do put it on the plan, we would look at whether there are any intrusions like any part of that stormwater control measure is in the stream buffer or it's in the floodplain. The last item we would look at would be impervious surface limits. If the site is in a watershed protection overlay and I will talk more about that, we look and planning also reviews this to make sure that they are not exceeding their maximum impervious surface limits for that watershed protection overlay. And those items that I just covered, let's, well, I won't go back. That's it pretty much. That's all we look at in rezoning. And I know that there have been some contentious rezoning cases where a lot of stormwater questions were asked, but that's pretty much all we review at this stage. So let's dig a little bit deeper into the stream identification and the stream buffer issue because that's often a point of contention. So we classify streams in three different categories. We have ephemeral streams, which are little more than a ditch. If it's raining, the water's flowing. Once the rain stops, there's no more flow in the ephemeral stream. Intermittent streams, they flow a lot of the time during a typical rainfall year, but they tend to dry up in the drier parts of a normal rainfall year. And perennial streams are those that flow all year long during a normal rainfall year. So we're not talking about the worst drought of the century. We're just talking about a normal year here. Only intermittent and perennial streams are required to be buffered. So ephemeral streams do not require buffers and they are not even required to be shown on the plans. So how do we figure out if a stream needs to be buffered or not? Well, the first source of information that we go to and also the applicant goes to is the US Geological Survey Topographic Map or the US Department of Agriculture, 1970 soil survey map. Those maps have and the background on this slide is from a topographic map. If something is shown as a stream on that map, then we expect to see it buffered on the zoning plan. However, you can disagree. You, the applicant or your engineers can disagree. And there is a process by which you can go through and see whether it really is a stream or not. And that's the stream identification process. Because the maps don't tell you whether it's ephemeral, intermittent or perennial. So you may be required to buffer something that you don't really need to buffer. But a stream, sort of like the British system of law, guilty until proven innocent. The stream is required to be buffered unless it's shown otherwise. So the first step that someone would go through is they would hire a consultant with the appropriate stream identification credentials. That consultant would go out in the field, they'd poke around, they'd look at the stream bed. In many different places, there is a scoring methodology. They would score the stream, they write up a report, include lots of maps, and they would submit it to the regulatory authority. And Will will talk about who that is in a minute. The regulatory authority then goes out to the stream to check on things, because they don't just accept what the consultant gives them. The regulatory authority then makes their own determination and they issue a letter, a stream determination letter saying, here's the parts you need to buffer and here are the parts you don't need to buffer. So who's the regulatory authority? Well, in the Noose River Basin, it is the state, the Department of Environmental Quality. In the Jordan Lake Cape Fear River Basin, within the city of Durham limits, it is us, the city of Durham. So we would review anything in the Jordan Lake Basin. Okay, so let's move along to site plan review. What is stormwater development review? What do we look at during site plan review? And as you are all aware, rezonings go through a review and voting by you and by city council. But once a rezoning is approved, the rest of the process is reviewed by staff only. There's no voting by public representatives. So here's what we look at and we'll get, I realize there's a lot of regulatory citations here. We'll get into the requirements a little bit. One is what we call our ordinance, our stormwater ordinance. It's called the Stormwater Performance Standards for Development. Then there is also the Watershed Protection Overlay Standards and that is in the UDO, which is the Unified Development Ordinance. And I know you're familiar with that. In the city of Durham reference guide for development, there are also additional details about our standards for 100 year flooding. Basically these rules boil down to two things, water quality and water quantity. Okay, so let's look at water quality. One quality marker we look at is nutrients. And if you've ever tried to grow a nice little lawn at your home and you put fertilizer on your lawn, you're putting nutrients on your lawn and those are nitrogen and phosphorus. We have three different regulatory basins in Durham, Falls Lake Basin, Lower Newspacin and Jordan Lake Basin. And you can see the division there with the dark, heavy black lines. All three of them have different nutrient standards. And there are no more nutrient standards in the Jordan Basin. We used to have them up until the city council approved changes to our ordinance in this past May and that was due to legislation from the state legislature. Okay, we also have water quality standards for total suspended solids. You can think of that as dirt in the water. And those requirements really depend on how dense the project is and whether it's located in a watershed protection overlay or not. So if it meets one or both of these criteria, the water has to be treated to remove total suspended solids. And the map here, let's talk about the different colorful patches on it. The watershed protection overlay looks at it's geared towards water supply lakes. And so within a certain, let's say, radius around the lake, it's an attempt to lower the density to preserve the more pristine nature of the lake. So it depends on how far away you are from the water supply lake as to how stringent standards are. As you can see in the middle or sort of that ridge line that runs through the middle of Durham is a big white patch. None of the middle of Durham, including downtown, is part of a watershed protection overlay. Okay, now let's get into water quantity. And if you, I don't know whether any of you saw this picture last year during Hurricane Florence, but that is the old farm neighborhood along the Eno River. And that was the result of that little aftermath that came through on Monday morning after the main part of the storm passed on by. So we look at peak flow means if you look at a storm, if you look at a stream and it starts raining, water will start to rise in the stream. And eventually after it stops raining, it'll go back down. The highest water level that is recorded is your peak flow. So we have various storms. They are aimed at different purposes. The one year storm, that's a state regulation and that's to prevent stream bank erosion. The two and 10 year peak flow standards are city based standards. And we use those to protect public health and safety in flooding also the 100 year storm. That's not applied to every site, but if we look at a case and we decide that there are flooding concerns downstream, we can ask the developer to, well, not ask, we'll just tell them we won't approve it until they provide 100 year peak flow detention. And other storms, we don't typically regulate them, but our reference guide standards leave that possibility open. So how do we check for compliance? We look at a lot of calculations and I won't go into these, but the design engineer has to prepare these calculations and plans that's called the stormwater impact analysis. And our group, we review the nutrient calculations, we review the hydrologic and hydraulic modeling for peak flow, we review total suspended solids compliance, we look at preliminary size and calculations for the stormwater control measures. That's what the acronym SCM stands for. These stormwater control measures are to treat water quality and quantity. We want to make sure there's enough room on the site for those things that we don't get to an ugly situation at construction drawings and find out it's not big enough. We also look at the location and easements. We have to have easements to be able to get in and look at those stormwater control measures. Okay, so construction drawing review, we make sure they're properly designed. They have to meet the state standards, Department of Environmental Quality standards. They also have to meet city of Durham standards. Then we also ensure that they're permitted and they're set up to be maintained in the future by the owner, which would be the property owner or for a subdivision, it would be the Homeowners Association. Okay, so let's talk about a few issues that have come up in past stormwater issues that have come up in controversial rezonings. How many of you remember the Cornwallis Road property rezoning? Well, you remember the word stormwater was mentioned a lot then, and as for those who weren't present on the commission at that time, that rezoning was voted down first by this commission and then by city council because there were a lot of objections and some of them were stormwater. There were objections because, and again, the developer didn't put the stormwater control measures on the rezoning plan, but he was showing them to neighborhood meetings that were held, so people were seeing where they were located and they were saying, they're in a floodplain. What are we gonna do about that? A couple of the rules or standards we have for design of stormwater control measures, we don't want, if it's flooding, we don't want floods eroding these dams. That would be an invitation for disaster, so it has to be above the 25-year flood elevation. And in Durham, because we've got so much elevation differential, there's really not much difference between the 25-year flood elevation and the 100-year flood elevation. So essentially, pardon me, would you say that again, not much difference between? The 25-year flood elevation and the 100-year. Now remember, the higher the recurrence interval of the flood, the bigger the flood's going to spread out in the floodplain. So the 100-year floodplain is wider than the 25-year floodplain. But in Durham, it's not very much wider because our land slopes up so quickly. We're not in the coastal plain down east. Does that make sense? Okay. And you can also not have any dam or embankment fill in a FEMA floodway. FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Authority. So you definitely can't put anything like that there. So let's look at a little graphic about the Cornwallis Road rezoning. First of all, the major road you see going from top to bottom over toward the right-hand side, that's 15501, going towards Chapel Hill. The stripey-looking shape is the floodway. This is Sandy Creek. Sandy Creek ran right by this development. It comes out of the Duke Golf Course. If any of you have been over there, it exits the Duke Golf Course, then goes under 15501 and pops up on the western side of the road. It then goes down across this Pickett Road. So if you look at the red rectangle toward the bottom of the slide, that's where Pickett Road is actually overtopped by 100-year flooding. So when we reviewed this rezoning, we started to make warnings, advisory comments to the developer that because we saw flooding already overtopping the road, that they were not going to be allowed to make that flooding any worse and that they would likely have to detain the 100-year storm. Now the bluish gray hatching, which is not striped, that's the 100-year floodplain. Okay, so that rezoning was not passed. So the developer went ahead and built a project anyway under the rezoning that was already allowed. And you see where the magenta arrow and the aqua arrow is, you can tell a lot of the forest has been stripped away. So this aerial photo was taken relatively recently as this development was under construction. What, so the magenta arrow points to the development, the aqua arrow and the yellow circle points to a stormwater control measure. It's basically a stormwater pond. It's not finished yet, but that's where its permanent location's going to be. And you notice it's up out of the 100-year floodplain. And they put it way over on the side so that it would be up out of the stream buffer also. So it's a better configuration than some of the things we saw during the rezoning stage. And so what level of retention is accomplished by that stormwater control measure? I did not review that project, but I suspect it's going to be the 100-year flood because we discussed this case a lot while it was going through rezoning. And it was pretty clear that we made advisory comments saying, because remember at rezoning stage, all we do is make sure you're showing the floodplain in the right place. We're not reviewing any designs or anything, but we like to warn people so there's no ugly surprises. So we said it's highly likely that we're going to require 100-year retention. So I have enough faith in my co-reviewers that I'm sure they did that. And this happens at site plan review. At site plan review. What if the developer refuses to do 100-year retention? No approval by us. What is the appeal process? Apparently there is no appeal process that I'm aware of. It's called go to the city manager and plead hardship. Realistically, I mean, that's what happens. There isn't a variance process with stormwater regulations like there is with some of planning's requirements. Now, you have to realize that almost all of our requirements are either based in state regulations founded in our NPDS permit, and I won't get into what, in national pollutant discharge elimination system permit. But it's a permit issued by state under a federal program. And it's got conditions that we have to meet. So we can't be in contravention of those. And the other thing that's the job always of an engineer is to protect public health and safety. So, I mean, you can't say you're protecting public safety if you're allowing more flooding over a road. So, down to the red box. Yes. And you said there, Santa Creek water at times was overflowing the road down here. And this is Pickett Road. How was this extraordinary like only in hurricanes or was this? No, these maps, these shapes on this map are determined by FEMA, a federal emergency management authority. And they do a lot of modeling and they give us these layers. And I can tell by the shape of that that because it's a continuous, the hatched shape is continuous, it's going over the top of the road. If you look at 15501 up there in the upper right corner, notice how that hatch thing doesn't go over the road. That's because it's contained within the culvert underneath it. And it's a huge culvert. But if you've ever been over on Pickett Road in that area, the culvert is not all that huge. So we have maps like this for the entire county. Yes, we do. And many of these things are available on our website or on the Go Maps website. I don't wanna say our like storm waters website, but it's the Go Maps website. I believe there's a floodplain layer you can turn on and you can look and see where the floods are. Any more questions on that slide? No, no, that's great. Thank you, it's a huge help. Sure. Okay, another issue that came up, does anybody remember the Burini Drive rezoning? Okay, well another thing that people trotted out a lot in their complaints about storm waters, everybody, why aren't developers using low impact design? And it's a magic solution to everything. Unfortunately, no, it is not for several reasons. One is it is a compliance option for our requirements, but we cannot force people to use it. It's one option. Only one LID project has been approved and built in Durham thus far. Why is that? The biggest reason is the terrible clay soils we have here in Durham. We are located in a geo, I guess, geologic region called the Triassic Basin. And it's a thin little sliver that runs sort of northeast to southwest and some of it runs through Orange County on down. And if you ever saw when fracking, when there was this big hullabaloo about fracking in the state of North Carolina and they showed maps of where the deposits might be, it's the same place as the Triassic Basin. So we have a thin sliver of that that runs through Durham. Actually, it's not so thin, it takes up much of the county. And the clay soil is relatively impermeable. LID generally relies on less dense development and lots of infiltration into the soil to keep down the stormwater and then get rid of what stormwater is generated. But if you can't infiltrate the stormwater on the site, LID is not going to be very, very useful for your site. Another thing is this little graphic illustrates a single family residence, which is abbreviated here by SFR, single family residential property. You notice a lot of nice things, infiltration trench. Not possible in Durham. Swale, we could do that. Rain garden, we could do that. Amended soils, rain barrel, bio retention cell. Those sound great except for the fact that currently our group is not allowing stormwater control measures on individual homeowner property. We'll allow it for subdivisions on homeowner HOA, homeowner association property because then you have the whole group of homeowners pitching in money to take care of it together. Other cities are doing that. They are allowing these measures on individual private properties. Someday it may come to that for us. But right now we have more than 800 stormwater control measures already in Durham. And if we allowed them on private property, we'd probably double that number. And we just don't have the staff to be reviewing and permitting those things at this point. Okay, any further questions? First of all, thank you very much. Oh, you're welcome. Appreciate it. Commissioner Brown? I have a couple of questions. Back to the making a determination. Is it a stream? You talked about the USDA 1970 soil survey map and that's about 49 years old. And I wanted to say anything. Yes, would you like to hear why we insist on using that map and not the newer things? I would, yes I would. Okay, well, there is a lot of newer stuff on the website, on the USDA's website. The problem is it shows the soil type. The soils are classified into lots of different types. And a very detailed map about the soil types. But on those newer maps, they don't show the streams. The only USDA maps that show the streams are those old ones. So, and some of them aren't even there anymore. They've been built over before stream buffer regulations came along. And suddenly, you're having people go out and do stream determinations for something that doesn't even exist. But that's why we still use that map. Okay, thank you for that. My second question concerns stormwater regulations for when the construction part is going on. The pond hasn't might not even been started or something. You're speaking of sedimentation and erosion control requirements. And I'm happy to tell you that's not my department. That program is administered for all of Durham, whether it be city or county, by the Durham County Engineering Group. And they have a sedimentation and erosion control program. And they also do the stormwater review like my group does for properties that are in the county only. For example, Research Triangle Park. Okay, so you can't answer my question. All right, thank you. Okay. Other commissioners, other questions? Vice Chair Hyman. I have a curiosity question. Sure. I am currently in a home on this association that has two stormwater treatment facilities currently under construction. They have not been turned over. Right. So this was one of Durham's failed communities. Oh no. So we are kind of working our way through it. So I'm still watching those two stormwater treatment facilities my question. And the first thing that you said was, we build them, we don't just leave them, they're regulated, they're turned over to the city. And then there are requirements that you have this, that you basically have someone to monitor it or to, I guess to work on it each year or to evaluate it each year. My question would be, do you continue to get feedback from whoever the engineers or whoever we hire to maintain those facilities? And how would that work after they're done? I don't know whether it was a slip of the tongue or not, but you said something that sounded like before they're turned over to the city, they are not turned over to the city, they are turned over to you, the Homeowners Association. What I meant was once they are approved by the city. They're turned over to the Homeowners Association because that's that step that's in there. Something has to be done before it's ready. Yes. So it's approved and then it's turned over to the Homeowners Association. You are correct. We are eagerly waiting for them to be turned over to the Homeowners Association. But once they are turned over and you have that process, how do you then know that they're functioning properly, that it was done, it's working? Okay, first of all, once they're turned over to the Homeowners Association or whoever the owner is, that entity is required to hire someone from our approved list to do an annual inspection and it's according to our standards. And then that annual inspection report must be submitted to us for review. And we have a person on our staff who is pretty much devoted to going out and checking a certain percentage of those. And if you remember Mayor Bell, you can thank Mayor Bell for that staff person because he recognized back when we gave him a presentation on stormwater devices and he was smart enough to ask, how many stormwater devices do you have and how many people do you have to go out and check on these reports? And he calculated the math and he said, okay, so every stormwater report and every stormwater device gets checked on once every five years. And we said, yep, and he said, that's not enough. He said, you need another person. So we were like, yes, and we got another person. So now we have somebody who on the average will check on that report on your facility once every other year. I think the important thing that you said was that your selection of those is from your approved list. Yes, we have an approval process. It can't be just anybody. Okay, and the developer knows that. So the developer knows that once this is turned over to the Home Owners Association, is there an obligation then to let us know that there is approved listing or? It's on our website, yes. So when your turn, when you get that reminder letter that says your report's new in another month or whatever, you can go to the list, call somebody up, get some quotes or whatever. And a lot of times this stuff's handled by the management group that you hire. Right. But I mean, if you want to do it yourself, that's fine. Well, they're telling us that if they handle one thing, we handle the other. So we're still kind of adjusting and we have a new management association. So you will be notified. The city is notified once it is turned over to the Home Owners Association. Yes, and you know, we even offer a handoff meeting to you homeowners where if you would like it, we will get together with you and explain what your responsibilities are. How exciting. Thank you. We aim to please. Commissioner Miller. So the Cherry Orchard subdivision, it's got its stormwater measure. It's approved in the Home Owners Association and then four years later, it's not working and the picket road down the way is being still being overflowed. Now what? Well, if the report shows deficiencies in the stormwater device in the way that it's functioning, it has to be fixed. Well, what's the process? The process is the person who does the annual maintenance inspection, which is a private contractor. They are supposed to notice these things and they are supposed to propose a schedule of these items that need to be fixed. And if they're detailed enough, they need to show us plans for how they're going to fix them and give us a schedule. If they, you know, and that's the point of having one of our people go out in the field to check because we find people, we even had one engineer that they're supposed to include photos. He included last year's photos because there's a problem this year and I guess he didn't want people noticing that there was a problem. Well, when our person went out in the field and saw it, it was pretty clear that these weren't recent photos and that there was a problem. So if they don't identify the problem, we will. And we'll start pushing to get a schedule. Right now, we do not have any monetary penalties for not following the process through and complying. We can send you nasty grams, but we can't. We'll presume that if the city can go to court. We hope it doesn't come to that. That's all I have, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Routtork. Thank you, Chair. I don't know anything about flood plains, so this may be a naive question, but should we have more stringent regulations? Or, I mean, just given that we've had some strong storms and you know, you're left playing. You never want to get out away from this meeting, do you? Open up the doors, box, I guess. This is good. I'm curious. Yeah, well, that is, what we are calling this is intensifying storm dynamics. There have been, as most of us are aware, there have been storms of large magnitude occurring much more frequently than it seems like they should be occurring, as in somebody looks at it and says, well, that's the 500-year storm, and then a month later, you get another 500-year storm. There's something going on, and I know people don't like to talk about climate change and global warming, but if things are changing with the storms, we need to know that because our storms are based on, you know, our analyses are based on the 100-year storm, and if it's not 100-year storm anymore, if it's something different. So we have formed internally with the city a little group mostly from public works, but we have some folks from planning on that, the county stormwater engineering folks participate also, and we are looking so far all we've done is talk and think because you know anytime we tighten up the standards, it's going to meet a lot of opposition from the developers, and state legislature has also been very active on the side of the developers in let's say, providing boundaries for stormwater regulation. So we have to have a well-thought-out approach. It's not something we can rush into on a reactionary basis, and so we're busy thinking, and there are many folks in our department that belong to the American Public Works Association, and they have an annual, the North Carolina chapter has an annual stormwater conference, and we are devoting a session to this question. It's going to be kind of a panel discussion amongst municipalities about what are you, how has this affected your community and what are you doing about it? Some communities are actually already doing something, but we'd like to hear what other folks are doing and then think about it some ourselves. Thank you, I'm glad that you're having those discussions. Just as a follow-up, I had a similar question and I appreciate your answer and it is true what the state legislature has been doing. You talked about two-year, 10-year, 100-year storms. So where is that hitched? I mean, is that hitched to state law? Is that hitched to FEMA? The actual classification, especially noting the intensity and the frequency is increasing. Okay, the actual determination, so I'm using kind of a shorthand, these storms are actually the, let's say that 10-year, 24-hour storm because there's different durations of storms. And those are all analyzed by the National NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or whatever. And the thing is there are very, there are long climate records starting back in the late 1800s, well, depending on where you are, but the climate records go back a ways. And if we're having, if the storms are really taking a drastic change in how intense they are, I know that someone in Charlotte last year at that stormwater conference did a presentation. They looked at data specific to Charlotte and they looked at much more recent data like just in the past 25 years to see whether it was changing because when you average 100 years worth of data points, the last two years don't make a whole lot of difference. They don't budge the scale much. And that's the concern. If things are really changing, we can't wait until we have enough storms to budge the numbers. But it's, again, you have to be able to scientifically defend any changes that you make, so. Yeah. No, thank you. And I appreciate that you're spending time thinking about it because this is gonna be, as you know, this is gonna be a growing concern, especially in a community like Durham where we are looking, we are growing and we are looking at having more dense development for environmental reasons, among other reasons, but this is one of the big concerns along with traffic. So I appreciate that. I was also just gonna ask if you could share your presentation, even if you could send it to Grace or something. Grace already has it. That's why it's up here. She did that. Okay, thank you. Commissioner Mellon. So the city has its own stormwater system. Who, what city department is in charge of that? The Storm Drainage Network? Yes. I mean, okay, well, let me tell you something that might shock and upset you a little. We are only responsible for maintaining what is in the city right of way. So anything on private property, we are not responsible for maintaining. Well, but you also have parks and you have city owned land. That's true. City owned land. And there's easements with ditches in them. Yes. I mean, I read a report, a stormwater management report that's, gosh, it's probably, I don't know how old it is now, but it's not, it wasn't last year. And it talks about, gosh, miles of ditches in the system. It depends on. Ditches and culverts and. Right, ditches. But my question was, who in the city is responsible for that? Well, most of what you're probably calling a ditch, I'm probably calling a stream. If it's a natural occurrence, then it's mother nature. And mother seriously, mother nature maintains them. Unfortunately, sometimes with bad consequences because we're getting so much development in Durham. One of the effects of more and more impervious area is that more water runs off and it runs off faster. So that increases flooding and it also increases the power of that water against the sides of that stream, which means our streams are getting what we call incised. They're very, the land comes along and it plunges straight down and it's wide and then it comes to a bottom. And that's not what a natural pristine stream. Well, I realize that, but my question is, who in the city is responsible for that system? Well, like I said, any stormwater pipes within the right of way we're responsible for. Anything that goes off of, for example, unfortunately citizens in subdivisions are sometimes upset to find that the curb and gutter stormwater that go along their streets once it leaves the curb and gutter and the right of way and it goes through somebody's yard to dump out in a stream there. Oh, this pipe is caving in. It's collapsing. You need to come fix it. Unfortunately, it's on your private property and we're not responsible. Again, I'm not, who maintains. Oh, so the stuff in the right way. The stuff in the right way. There's a creek that runs through Oval Park. It is completely piped. It's a city park, it's a pipe. The pipe actually continues out of the park, under a road, back through a whole bunch of backyards and a city easement and then dumps out in a ditch two blocks up. That's a city facility, who maintains that? Well, going through the park, it would be the city. It would be hard for me to tell without looking at a map and seeing where the pipe actually goes. But if it leaves city land and it's not in the right way, then it's the person who owns the land. The city built the facility in an easement granted by the homeowners through their backyards. Okay, well, it sounds like you're asking me about a very specific case. Well, but those systems, I'm reading about it in the report, the city says. Here's the system. Well, the easements are there to give us access, but they do not indicate that we are liable to maintain them. The reason why they're, especially if stormwater pipes run through multiple properties, let's say they collapse on somebody's property and the collapse causes water to back up onto somebody else's property. And let's say the homeowner who owns the property where the collapse is says, well, I'm just not gonna do anything. I don't have the money or I don't care. It's really that person's responsibility to fix it up, but the easement gives the city the right to come in and fix it up if it's affecting public health and safety and nothing is being done fast enough. Mr. Miller, any additional questions? Still wanna know who in the city is responsible for the pipes you're responsible for. Okay, so things in the right way that we're responsible for, it is the public, unless it's, let's say it's on parks and rec land, then it would be parks and recreation. Otherwise, it's the public works department in the operations center on MLK Boulevard. All right, thanks. I mean, on behalf of all the commissioners, thank you very much. Really appreciate your time. This is very informative. Thank you for listening. Because we talk about it all the time. Okay. Now I understand a little better. Well, and I'll be happy to look at your specific case with you, it sounds. I don't have a case, it's just, I'm aware of the facility. You're aware of the facility, okay, well. I used it as an example. Ask another. Okay. We'll follow up. One final question. So when we do, because we do talk about it a lot, if, you know, residents express concern to us, can we just contact the public works department and ask someone for a quick assessment of. Yes, we have a drainage infrastructure group. And if you go on our webpage and I'll be happy to send somebody the information if they could maybe grace and her folks, they can get it out to you. And I would, I know there's two ladies in the audience tonight that were particularly interested in stormwater. I would highly recommend, okay, let's go back to the whole floodplain thing. We're out there to protect public health and safety. We look at the FEMA maps. Also, we have our own internal records of where people have called with drainage complaints like there's flooding on my street or whatever. That all gets recorded. It goes into our internal GIS maps. And that's one thing we're looking at in our reviews now is where are there any drainage complaints downstream of this area that are already indicating problems? So if you have an issue, please report it. Now it may be that they, and we do have folks when you report it, that's their job. They go out to your property and assess things and they may speak with you or otherwise communicate about what they found. It may be an answer you don't like. Sorry, it's your problem to fix up, not ours, but at least it went in the database. You know, the reports available or the location of the reports available in Go Maps or is that not publicly available? I don't think it's publicly available, but I think the person who obviously filed the drainage complaint would get a response. Right, okay. You would have to ask the stormwater infrastructure group about those drainage complaints and what's public information, what's not. You could always do a freedom of information request. Okay, thank you. Thank you again, we really appreciate it. Okay, you're welcome. We will move to our next item. This is the new comprehensive plan update. Good evening, commissioners. Sarah Young with the planning department. I wanted to give you a little bit of an update tonight on where we are with the comprehensive plan effort, particularly as we are getting ready to launch our first real public engagement events here in the coming months. So first of all, as a reminder from, I think the last time you got an update, we have organized two teams of folks to help with the outreach and communications on the plan itself, the plan process. One is the outreach team, which we took nominations for. We got, I don't remember if I told you this last time, we got over 160 nominees. We agreed to take them all. We had our inaugural meeting with them on the 25th of July and over 90 of them attended that orientation session. We have a makeup orientation session for some additional folks tomorrow evening. So we will kind of train up and get oriented another group of hopefully about 20 or so more folks. And when is that? When is that tomorrow? That's tomorrow, yeah. We also launched and had our first communications team meeting that is mostly folks that we'll be dealing with kind of the PR, marketing, putting together materials to support the outreach team members in distributing information about the various events that we will be having for the comprehensive plan. So those two groups are now started. We are still working on identifying who from the outreach team will be engagement ambassadors. These are the folks that will be compensated to do additional outreach and follow-up specifically after public events with groups that did not attend our events. So basically the premise is we want as much as possible for everyone to feel welcome and invited and participate together in the public events that we're gonna have. And we know that some folks just won't for a variety of reasons and they may not be able to, they may not trust us, they may not trust the process. And so these ambassadors will work after the fact to see who was not at the meetings or at the workshops or at the whatever and meet them where they are, hold pop-up events, follow up with them kind of one-on-one or in small groups or whatever it takes to get these people engaged to build trust with them so that at some point our hope is that they do feel like equal partners at the table with everyone else at the larger events. That's gonna take a lot of legwork and a lot of resources. And so those folks will be compensated for that. So we're still working on identifying what subset of the outreach team comprises these ambassadors. Yep. Are there commission members who serve on either of these teams? Say that again. Commission members on either team. I don't think so. It was open for nomination. It was sent to us, but... Yeah, we didn't have anyone from the planning commission now. And sorry, I had to go through 160, but I was like doing the face check, like no, none of you. Okay, so that's one thing that I wanted to share. The other thing that I wanted to share is that both those groups will have several more meetings to finish kind of getting oriented, help provide input on how exactly our first public event is structured and what we're looking to do, how it is we're gonna get the word out. One of the main benefits of using this outreach team approach is that no one knows kind of their circle, their network better than themselves. So if you tell me, hey, the best way to engage with my network is, I need paper flyers or I need a blurb to go in the church newsletter or whatever, you tell us what works for you and we will produce that content and provide it to you. So we're trying to use all these folks as experts in their own neighborhood or organization or civic group or whatever. Right now we are aiming for an early November, large public kind of kickoff series of events. We will plan to have the same type of event repeated multiple times to try and give folks the broadest opportunity to attend. And so as those details get fleshed out, we will certainly share those with you. So how does this begin? In other words, I see this as like a circle and you have to fry up some fibers and then start pulling. Where, how does this start? The outreach part start. In other words, we've hired the planning next people and we have our internal planners who are working on things. Are we already working on changes to the comprehensive plan or in other words, where do we start unwrapping this? Which end of the box? So we are, we have said from the beginning that this is we are not updating our comprehensive plan, we're throwing our comprehensive plan away and we are creating a brand new comprehensive plan and that's predicated on community input, right? So while we may know as staff a bunch of technical things we're gonna kind of put that to the side and we need to hear from the community. The community has changed a lot since the last comprehensive plan was done and so we want to have an honest effort at, okay, what are the concerns of the community that is here today? What are their concerns for the future, for how we continue to develop for the things that they've seen develop already? So our first big phase of public engagement and the project is broken out into five phases if you'll recall is we're calling vision. So let's get all together and agree on what are the big goals, the big picture of vision that we wanna implement through the plan? And if we can get folks in the community to agree on that then everything works from that. From that we will derive the specific policy direction, et cetera. So it is an iterative process starting macro to micro. There has been actually a lot of work already going on behind the scenes not just the logistical stuff with staff and these teams and the consultant but we have had not just planning staff but other departments helping us get the word out at all sorts of other public community events that are already going on. We have set up a website Engagedurum.com and that has not just a comprehensive plan but five additional pilot projects that are using kind of the same portal to try and find a unified way to provide information about engagement related opportunities to the public. So there's been a lot of stuff that's already been happening which is really exciting that we're actually finally doing stuff. But yeah, so I hope that answers your question a little bit. It does a lot. So the last thing that I wanted to touch on real quickly is I know we've had some discussion with this group about how does this group specifically get involved, how are you involved? And we've gotten questions from some of our other boards and commissions likewise in the same vein. So what we are proposing is kind of a three part relationship in terms of our boards and commissions and their work and engagement on the comp plan. And the first is that we would like to hold quarterly summits, meetings, workshops, I don't know what we'll call them, where all boards and commissions and their members are invited to come here, latest updates, ask us questions, just kind of general know what's going on and hopefully you can appreciate that between the city and the county, I think that there's a lot, 40 some, I think different boards and commissions. We don't have the bandwidth to come every month to every single one of those and give your personalized update. Although we're doing that for you all. But so our solution to that is to have these quarterly sessions where everyone and anyone that's on a board and commission, a city or county that could be interested can attend. So that's kind of part one. So I would like to, at least to get a feel for what's happening with the general public, be able to go and observe some of the meetings where the public is invited to engage in vision building and those kinds of things just to get a feel for who's there and how it's going and that kind of thing. So part two is that while you all are the planning commission, you are the planning commission because you are so a part of this community and it is our expectation and our hope that you will participate in the public events, not just go and observe, but go and participate as well. In the past, I know we have with varying degrees of success or not, publicized to you all and our other boards and commissions when we've had public events and we really would like for you all to actually be involved. And if you don't wanna actually participate but you wanna at least come and observe as Commissioner Miller mentioned, we highly encourage you to do that. So that's kind of the second piece is actually come and be a part of the engagement of the stuff that's gonna happen. And then the third piece, the last piece of how we wanna work with our boards and commissions is basically at the detail level. When we get to a point in the policy drafting, so we're talking months, year down the road, when we have subject matter topics that are germane to the purview of a particular board, we will absolutely take those issues and go to that board and discuss them and get their input and feedback as appropriate. So that's kind of the three pronged approach, these quarterly sessions, inviting and making sure that everyone is well informed of all the opportunities to participate with the public or at least observe and then bringing topical content related to that board directly to that board for their deliberation and recommendations. Great, thank you. There may be other questions and comments. Am I correct that this is, you're actually calling this phase zero, what you're doing at this point. So I think it's worth keeping, I think that's a really smart way to think about it that this is still just assembling a team who is then gonna be going out to engage the public to be coming to the visioning events. So as we're hearing this update from staff, things are happening, there has been, and it's impressive that this many people were either nominated or nominated themselves, but this is still phase zero because this is the getting prepared and getting ready phase of the work. The final thing you said just from my perspective, I know we have indicated our interest in being engaged in a deeper way. And I like what you're suggesting and I'll be really interested to be able to spend time with some of the other commissions and to hear their thoughts as we get the quarterly updates, but in particular thinking about the planning commission side of things, I could see at a point down the road, it's hard to know what it is yet, but as you're coming to us with specific items or issues, the committee process we just have with the expanding housing choices provides a way for us either to do it as a whole or to be able to set up specific committees. So hearing that, it's something that I can see us looking to engage in once we get there. I think it's gonna be hard to know until we get there what the things are. Absolutely and the other thing is that this board as opposed to some of the others that have a more focused scope, you all have a fairly broad scope. It's almost all things land use, right? And so that could touch a lot of things. It will be much more difficult, I think to squeeze in probably the amount of topics that we need to cover with you in just your regular meeting. So we will need to figure out the best way that you wanna tackle that, but yeah, absolutely. Great and I would say I think don't be shy given what we have said in the past and looking at everyone here this evening is that we have the ability to set up multiple committees if there are multiple issues that need to be tackled. So please bring us those issues as they come. Let me open it up for any other feedback or questions, other commissioners. Great, I wanna just thank the staff. You've been really deliberate about this and thoughtful and appreciate the update and keep moving on phase zero. Yep. Great, thank you. So we have our final item, Ms. Smith, our October meeting schedule. Yeah, so I don't know if, I got seven responses today. So that's about half of the commission and I know we have a few absences tonight, but I just wanted to revisit, I sent out an email today to everyone received the email and if you didn't, I'll explain. If you didn't, I didn't. So Commissioner Low probably wasn't near his email when I sent it. He may have been up here with us when it went out, but we have some potential conflict for the October 8th regularly scheduled meeting and the staff was wondering about availability for the October 15th. And I got back six saying that that would work. Mr. Bryan has a conflict and that would not work for him, but I wanted to just revisit because I knew I hadn't heard back from a few of you. So if you would just raise your hand again, while we're sitting here, there's if the 15th will work, raise your hand. Oh, so we got a couple, we'll check in calendars. Okay, so it looks like Mr. Bryan, what about Mr. Johnson, you still checking your calendar? Everybody else can take their hands down. So let's go. So Mr. Johnson, do you think you would be available on the 15th? So we would shift it back a week. We're not gonna have two meetings in October. We would just move the one meeting back. Now I don't want to scare anyone two nights and that'd be a lot for October. So we'll probably, I'm gonna check with the other two, but I think knowing how many we have here tonight, we have enough for a quorum and that gives us a couple extra just in case there's sickness or last minute emergencies. The staff would ask that if you're willing to do that, would you make a motion to amend the calendar and we will post the calendar on the web and go ahead and take care of that and make sure we advertise that so everyone knows that the meeting schedule has changed. Mr. Chairman, I move that the commission amend its meeting schedule to move the regularly scheduled meeting for October, which I believe is currently scheduled for the eighth to the 15th. Second. I have a motion by Commissioner Miller, seconded by Commissioner Bryan, all those in favor, please say aye. Any opposed? All right, we really appreciate that, but please, I want to reiterate, if you said you were gonna be here, please try your best to be here. I'll reach out to the other commissioners tomorrow and to make sure they understand and Commissioner Alturk. Can I ask you about a specific case, not the October meeting? I've got a lot of emails and calls about Z18 triple zero 36, but I don't see it on the September. It's probably not ready to move forward. Is that a guess road? This is the guess road storage case. It's not next month. It's not moving forward right now. All right, thank you. There's some back and forth. It's still under review. It's just not quite ready, but yeah, it's definitely not scheduled for next month. Thank you. Thank you. Before we adjourn, I'll just note as well, just for your individual interest that Ms. Smith, you may add to this as well, the expanding housing choices, recommendations for the governing bodies was just posted today. And so it is on the expanding housing choices website. And I do appreciate that, I only got to look at it really quickly. And as everyone knows, there's a ton of information with a lot of attachments, but I appreciate that the staff took the time to walk through each of the recommendations that this body made in our proposal and made a point of saying what the actual current proposal addresses or does not address and the reasons why. So it doesn't take everything that we agreed on, but it does put it into one memo to make it really easy to understand. So thank you for doing that and definitely go look at the proposal that goes to city council September 3rd, and then the county later in the month. I don't know that date right off the top of my head. I know it's city council the 3rd because I just happened to look at the calendar today, but I can send you the dates tomorrow just so you have them. I don't mind doing that. I'm gonna send you the email with the other information from Jennifer's presentation, but real quickly, we will just reminder, we will be sending out some options for a retreat for you because it's that time of year. And I'm also gonna look into purchasing some planning commissioner books. I know we did those a few years ago, so I'm gonna purchase some more if you've misplaced yours and you want one I'll purchase enough for everybody again. It's the same edition, right? You're talking about the intro book from the school of government. I believe, well, no, this one was a different one that we gave out. It's another, a different book that we gave out a couple of years ago. I'll purchase them if you already have it, you don't have to take it, but I'll try to get them maybe by the October meeting, if not sooner. Great, thank you. And then the final thing is now that we're back to full membership, we may relook at the seating assignments. So just when you come in next month, just double check before you sit down. But with that, this meeting is adjourned. Have a good night. Thank you all.