 We're now live on YouTube. Good morning everyone. I wanna welcome you to the, I believe first virtual meeting of the Joint City County Planning Committee. And the first today is June 3rd, 2020. And our first order of business is the election of the chair and vice chair. I'm going to turn the meeting over to Pat Young, our planning director. Good morning, Chair Rekow and members of the committee. Thank you all for being here today in this virtual format. As you all will recall from our interlocal agreement that established this body, the chair of this body alternates annually. And last year, of course, County Representative Chair Rekow was chair. And so therefore the chair this year would have to be a city representative. So at this time I'll take nominations for chair. I would like to nominate Charlie Reese to be chair. Back in. Okay, thank you. Any other nominations for chair? Okay, so one of the, as I think you all are probably familiar with by now one of the peculiarities or uniquenesses of the virtual meeting, the law that authorizes us to conduct these virtual meetings is that we need to have a roll call vote, which we obviously normally handle that through two of hands. So I'll ask the clerk, Susan Cole to do a quick roll call vote to vote on for Charlie Reese for chair. Commissioner Rekow. Yes. Council Member Johnson. Yes. Commissioner Howerton. Commissioner Howerton. I'm sorry, I had myself muted. Yes. That's okay. Yes. Commissioner Jacobs. Yes. Council Member Reese. Yes. Planning Commissioner Member Ms. Hammond. Ms. Hammond. Council Member Mr. Mark Anthony Middleton. I vote yay. Okay. Thank you, Susan and congratulations to you, Chair Reese. And if it's agreeable, I'll turn it over to you to run the election for the vice chair. Thank you, Pat and thank you, colleagues. I appreciate that vote of confidence. Look forward to chairing this committee over the next year. I did want to, on a technical matter, you call, I believe a name was called and the person did not answer. Can we determine is that person on the call but unable to speak, not on the call? Can we get an answer on that? Cause I want to make sure everyone who is supposed to be here and wants to be here is participating. That was Ms. Hammond. And is she, is she, does she appear to be on the call? I'm going to. This is Sarah Young. It appears that she has dropped off the call. So if she is able to rejoin, we will let you know. Okay. So she is not per the new legislation. She, oh, is she rejoined? Yeah, real quick per the legislation. If anyone drops off the call or is not on the call, their vote is not counted in the affirmative as they would be if they had just left a meeting without being excused. So just wanted to make that clear. Great. Yeah. Mine was a drop off. Well, welcome back. We're glad to have you Elaine. Thanks for being with us. I have somehow made a mistake with my Zoom settings and I'm seeing all of the participants, not just the video, which is, and I can't, if someone has some advice on how I fix that, that'd be great. Otherwise, we're just, I mean, I know you know how to do things. I do. So if you hover over one of the non-video participants, you see that little blue box with the dots in it. Wow, you're good. Wow, you're good. You got it. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So I'm the chair of the joint city county planning committee. That's pretty wild. And I just want to say thanks again to everybody. I wanted to say a few words about how I want to try to preside over these meetings. It's been my observation that the best committee chairs try to keep conversations to the appointed agenda times, except where it's really important, circulate conversation to make sure that everyone has a chance to speak who wants to speak before folks get a second bite at the apple and try to recognize speakers in the order in which they make themselves and make their request to speak known. So on that last point, virtually that is can be a bit of a challenge, would ask that folks, if during a particular presentation or speaker, if they want to be heard on that, that they drop a note in the chat just to let me know and that way I can kind of go in order. If something comes up that isn't, that you feel is important enough to interrupt a speaker to ask in the middle of the presentation, that's fine. But just try to figure out, I will, and I will try to keep my eye on the boxes to make sure to see if that's happening. The other thing I wanted to say, let me make sure that's, oh, and at 10 o'clock, I may have to step out of frame for about 30 seconds to help my second grader get on her 10 a.m. a class Zoom. So I'm sorry about that everybody, this is the world we live in now. The next order of business is the election of vice chair and I need to lay myself before the committee in abject apology about this. What seems like about two years ago was actually just four months ago, this group met to try to elect new officers while I was at an offsite training and I set y'all up for failure and I apologize. In preparing for my election as chair, I thought I was doing a good job at researching who was supposed to be the next vice chair, pulled up some old agendas from Joint City County Planning Committee and thought that the next up in the rotation was Commissioner Howerton. I was wrong and that caused conflict on this board when I wasn't even here. So that made it triply bad and I apologize profusely. I screwed that up and I'm especially apologize to Commissioner Howerton and Commissioner Jacobs for putting y'all in that difficult position and just want to say it was not my intention to try to skirt the normal way we do things. It is important to make sure that rotation stays the same. Just for example, on the city side, I know Council Member Middleton I believe is next up in the rotation to be vice chair next year and will be in rotation to be chair. And I know that's something that's important to him and all of us to make sure that all of us on the committee have that opportunity to lead this group. And so that having been said and again with my most abject apologies for having really royally messed that up last time for now four months on, I would, is it appropriate for the chair to make a nomination at this time? I don't know how that works, Pat. I don't think there's anything that prohibits that. Great, so having been made aware of the correct rotation at this time, I would nominate chair of the County Commission, Wendy Jacobs is the next vice chair of the joint city county planning committee. Second. Second by Jillian Johnson from the city council. Is there any conversation about this or can we move to the vote? I do have a question, Mr. Chairman. Yes, councilor. I don't know if it's under the rubric of parliamentary inquiry, but if there's a rotation, just an agreement, a gentleman or ladies agreement between, if there's in fact a rotation that's binding, then why do we vote? Or is that rotation just kind of an understood thing? I think this council, Pat, if you could help us with that, that'd be great. Yeah, so there's not any written or explicit commitment to that rotation or that approach. I certainly would endorse what chair Rees has said that that's been practiced for as long as I've been here, which is going on 12 years. So, but it's not part of the interlocal agreement or any other written agreement. Okay, cool. I know, I think I'm the newest elected. I'm still in my first term on the board and it seems to me that since my arrival and I stated, I don't mean this as a pejorative, it seemed a bit incestuous in terms of kind of going back and forth between the county and the city. And if I thought my two colleagues have already served in those capacities since I've been here, I could be mistaken. I'm not putting this in concrete. Well, let me clear if I might commission member Middleton and I apologize for my lack of clarity. When I was speaking before I was referring to the practice about which members serve in the different capacities, the rotation of the chair between the city and county is part of the agreement between, that is part of the signed binding agreement between the city and county. So then that if one body is represented one year as chair, the other body needs to be the following term and they're one year terms. Got you. Councilor, have you served as chair before? I've not. You've not? Okay, brilliant. We got you now, buddy. That's all my inquiry. Thank you so much. All right. And I believe you're up next as the following year as vice chair. Gotcha. As I understand these things. Gotcha. Thank you. Thank you all. If there are no other questions, I'd ask for a vote. All those in favor of the nomination of County Commissioner Wendy Jacobs as vice chair of the Joint City County Planning Committee. The vote would be aye. And if we could get the roll call going, that would be great. Commissioner Recal? Aye. Council Member Johnson? Aye. Commissioner Howerton? Aye. Commissioner Jacobs? Aye. Council Member Reese? Aye. Planning Commission Member Ms. Hyman? Aye. Council Member Mark Anthony Middleton? I'll go aye. Motion carries seven to zero. All right, congratulations, Commissioner Jacobs. And I appreciate your willingness to serve. Next up on the agenda is announcements. I guess that means announcements from members or from staff. Is that right, Pat? It is. Usually the chair starts that and recognizes anybody who has an announcement. Staff does not have any announcements. Well, in terms, does anyone on the committee have any announcements at this time? Raise your hand. I can see everybody now. OK, well, the only announcement I want to make is that I believe this is the first time that the Joint City Planning Committee has met virtually. It's also the first time I've ever chaired this committee. So I'm undoubtedly going to make some mistakes today. Bear with me. We're going to get through it and appreciate your patience in advance. There are no other announcements. I'll move on to the next item on the agenda. That's item five, approval of the minutes from our February 4th meeting. Again, that's the one where I was absent. So I don't have a lot of input into these minutes. But if anybody had any additions, revisions, or corrections, please make those known now. If there are none, I'm open to a motion to approve the minutes from the February 4th, 2020 meeting of Joint City Planning Committee. Move to approve. Second. Motion by Councillor Milton, second by Commissioner Jacobs. All in favor. The vote is aye. I believe it's time for a roll call now. Charlie, I didn't second that. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I did. Was that Kimi? Are you Commissioner Recal? No, it was Commissioner Howerton. Commissioner Howerton. It's hard to see who's talking. I apologize. Thank you for the correction. Seconded by Commissioner Howerton. And now I think we need that roll call vote, please. Commissioner Recal. Aye. Council Member Johnson. Aye. Commissioner Howerton. Aye. Commissioner Jacobs. Aye. Council Member Reese. Aye. Planning Commission Member Ms. Hammond. Aye. Council Member Mark Anthony Middleton. I vote aye. Motion carries 7 to 0. Great, we've got some minutes. That's fantastic. Next item is city and county managers' priority items. Do we have a representative from the city manager's office on the line? Don O'Toole is on the line, and there are no priority items. Thanks. Don, how's it going? It's going great. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks for that. Anyone from the county manager's office? Brian Wardell from the county. There are no priority items that I'm aware of at this time. Hi, Brian. Thanks for being with us this morning. We appreciate it. How are you? Doing great. All right. That's number six. Number seven is annual reports. This is a chance to hear from a number of the groups that often have matters that relate to the business of Joint City County. Planning, first up is the appearance commission, the chair, Lynn McClay. Ms. McClay, are you on the call? Lynn McClay could not attend this morning. It was just me. OK. Thank you, Ms. Seibel. Is it the when the chair can't be present? Is it staff liaisons? Or do we expect some kind of statement or presentation? Or are we just supposed to read the attachment and let that be that? I'll give a brief overview of the packet. Thank you. Go right ahead. Awesome. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Kayla Seibel. I'm a senior planner in the Durham City County Planning Department. I'm the staff liaison to the appearance commission. And the chair, as I mentioned, Lynn McClay could not make it here this morning. But in your packet, you have a report from the chair detailing the commission's 2019 accomplishments. So just a brief overview. The appearance commission has 15 members. Seven are appointed by the city council. And eight are appointed by the board of county commissioners. The appearance commission's mission is to cultivate visual appeal and recognize the benefits of good design, which enhance the quality of life for residents of the city and county of Durham. The commission has four subcommittees that work on various activities that support their mission. Last year in 2019, the commission hosted their annual Golden Leaf Awards. This is a award ceremony that recognizes new developments in landscaping in Durham County. They reviewed text amendments and ordinance revisions from the Planning Department and the Transportation Department. And they hosted a tour of the newly renovated Chesterfield Building as part of their education and engagement efforts. And finally, they began working on a new web page to share the work that they do and to generate interest beyond the traditional design community and architectural community, so expanding their reach. So this is just a brief overview. I'm available to answer any questions you have or pass along any feedback you have for the appearance commission. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Seibel, I appreciate that. Are there any questions from Ms. Seibel about the annual report for the Durham City County Appearance Commission? Commissioner Rack, I'll go right ahead. I had one question. It appears as though there's been quite a bit of turnover with five people either, actually it looks like six, either resigned or removed in the past six months, six, eight months. Curious about that. Yeah. I think this has been something the Appearance Commission struggles with is retaining members to fill their entire term. We do have quite a few longstanding members. Right now, I know this is just 2019 recap, right now we have two vacancies only because two members had their terms expire and so they have to take a break before being reappointed or appointed again. But yeah, at the end of 2019, we did have several Appearance Commission members that decided to resign. But you don't think there's any problem in terms of the function or what the expectations of appointees are in terms of their responsibilities? My experience talking with the commission members was that the reasons for leaving the commission were all across the board. They were different. A lot of them were more personal reasons, wanting to have more time at home or commitments. OK, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Anybody else have any questions or comments about the Appearance Commission annual report? OK, Ms. Library? Oh, commission is taken, go right ahead. I just had one comment, which is I just really appreciate what the Appearance Commission does and the Golden Leaf Awards that they do every year. I think they're terrific and appreciate the work of the commission. Thank you, Commissioner Jacobson. Absolutely, we really appreciate it. Oh, Commissioner Reck, I'll go right ahead. Wendy's comment brought up the thought when I was reading through the reports and got to the historic properties, I thought of the fact that the Appearance Commission joint ventures with the Environmental Affairs Board to do a joint award. And it dawned on me that it might be appropriate for the Appearance Commission to consider joint award with historic properties commission. So I was going to bring it up also with historic property. That's a brilliant idea. So I think it would enhance the awards even more to focus on historic property. That's awesome. Commissioner Reck, how do you want to reach out to Ms. McClay, the chair of the Appearance Commission and raise that possibility with her? Well, I thought I'd do it when we get to their report, but I also was doing it with the Appearance so that they would get together. Awesome, sounds great. OK, anybody else in the Appearance Commission? OK, next up is the Board of Adjustment. I believe Chair Rogers is here. I saw him. He's actually the first face I saw. There he is. Hi, Jacob. How's it going? I'm doing very well. Thank you. Great. Thanks for joining us today. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the Board of Adjustment over the last year? Sure. Good morning, committee members, and thank you, Chairman Reis. In 2019, the Board heard and disposed of 56 cases, which was almost a 61% increase from the 2018 case load. Cases were distributed as follows. 29 minor special use permits were approved. One minor special use permit was denied. 23 variance requests were approved, and one variance request was denied. Two reasonable accommodation requests were approved. We rarely get those, and it was interesting that we had two in one year. But included in the report is also the attendance for the record for the board members, which was approximately 91.25% of our board members. So if you've got any questions, I'd love to help out and answer. Great. Thank you, Chair Rogers. Does anybody have any questions for Jacob or any comment about the work of the Board of Adjustment and or their annual report? Commissioner Recal, you are recognized. Thank you. This would be for possibly either the chair or staff to answer. There's a note on attendance that a member was reported to the county clerk, but no action taken. Is that still outstanding at this time? I think I would have to ask Jessica to speak up on that. I think I know which member you're referring to, but. Good morning, Jessica Dachery. I'm the planning liaison for the Board of Adjustment. We do have one person that has had attendance issues. And in December 2019, we did discuss with the county clerk that issue. At the time, we had concerns for the January and February meeting having sufficient quorum. So we decided not to move forward with any action. We also heard from the county clerk that they have difficulty getting qualified applications. So there were no replacements in the wings waiting to fill that slot. We had that applicant at both of those meetings in January and February. And so we haven't moved forward. If the attendance continues as it is satisfactorily, I think probably we won't make any forward motion on that either. Does that answer the questions? Yes. Thank you. You're very welcome. Mr. Chairman, you're a customer of Middleton's right ahead. It's going around, man. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Commissioner Wreck, I actually kind of anticipated my really a comment about the attendance. I just wanted to commend the Board of Adjustments on their attendance record. And as if there are any secrets you have that you might want to share is relative to some other bodies around here. You're perhaps just awaiting a charge of the nature of the work you guys do that just compel people to attend. But I just wanted to commend you on the attendance record, notwithstanding the outlier that we've been talking about. So I just wanted to commend you to say great work. Thanks, Mr. Chair. Thank you for those remarks. We've got some very dedicated individuals on that board. I think they also understand the importance of the Board of Adjustment and that. And I would say that finding qualified individuals for this board, we really need to focus on it's, it's a very important board to the city and county and making sure we have qualified members and those actually show up consistently is very key. So I appreciate those remarks. Thank you, Councilor Middleton. I think you're speaking into the space what everybody's thinking when they read that attendance report. So thanks for that. Anybody else have any questions or comments about the Board of Adjustment before we go to the next group? Great, okay. Thank you again, Jacob, for being here. I really appreciate the report and the work and your willingness to come and join us on this new virtual reality we're in. So thanks, Jacob, appreciate it. Thank you for your time. All right, next up is the Durham Open Space and Trails Commission. Is Dave Connolly with us today? I see you, Dave. Good morning. I have spent more time interacting with you over the last two weeks than I have my entire tenure on the city council. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you for your support. Go right ahead, it's your turn. Yes, one of my hobbies has been trying to protect the American Tobacco Trail from encroachment. And we scored a win, I think, this past week. But do you want to know about Durham Open Space and Trails Commission or Dost? Yes. 2019 included these accomplishments in Trails. We have three Trails that are either in design currently with Public Works, our Kelly Brunett Trail and Third Four Creek Trail, or about to be in design, as in the case of the Beltline Trail. Feasibility study for Durham's future priority trails is continuing with Alta Planning. And last May, before we were quarantined, several of you participated in our second bus tour of trail projects. For Open Space, staff acquired properties in the Little River Watershed and a sandy road parcel in Eastern Durham was pursued. Meanwhile, Ronald Smith and the Open Space Committee devoted much time and effort to protecting the new Hope Watershed from ongoing development pressures. Our fairly new equity committee, or Dost E, continued its work both at Boston and across Durham to raise awareness about equitable community engagement with several community partners. Matching grants, working with Brendan, committee processed and approved four grants for the Cycle El Futuro, Marine Joy, Calderby Creek and the Durham Parks Foundation. We have seven priorities for 2020, priority goals, and I'd like to highlight a few. For the city, we continue to need a staff assignment to begin implementing the approved Urban Open Space plan. It's a wonderful plan. It just needs a little action. And for Durham County, we continue to need a staff assignment to begin planning for trails out in the county, including two new Rails to Trails opportunities. And lastly for the Beltline, Dale McKeel has led the application for a build grant for the city. If successful, this major grant could complete the Beltline's funding. So that's it for my vocal comments. Great, Dave, thank you so much for that report. I just wanted to say how much we appreciate this important work and everything you do outside of the Dost context. And this is a great report. Does anybody have any questions or comments about the annual report while we still have Dave here on the line with us? Yes, Chair Jacobs, go right in. Well, Dave, first of all, I want to thank you for all of your recent advocacy about the American Tobacco Trail. I did get the good news yesterday that which I'm sure you know about, that the plans have changed for the gas line. So thank you for ringing the alarm about that. Could you talk a little bit more in little more detail about the trails that you out in the county? Could you tell us a little bit more about those? Certainly. The 2011 master plan contains both city and county trail efforts. There is an unused corridor going from Durham to Rocksboro at the Norfolk Southern controls. There has been interest over the past 10 to 15 years in converting that into a Rocksboro rail trail. It would go out through Eastern Durham, Trayburn, Derugemont, for example. So far the railroad has shown no interest in parting with it, although there is no possibility of ever running a train over it without millions of dollars in investments by the railroad company. The other line would be out toward Falls Lake. We, as known as the Panther Creek or the Seaboard Rail Trail. There was a line abandoned in 1979 and that one would require acquisition of easements since it was abandoned, but it's 70% in the county and 30% in the city. So thinking perhaps a joint effort could begin to work on that five mile link. It would link up between the city and the mountains to see trail. I appreciate that because even thinking about that, the second one, that's an area where we have more and more development and more and more people living out in the Eastern part of the county. That's where a lot of our residential development is really happening now. So I'm always thinking about where are people living and where's the growth and making sure that people have access to trails like that. I know people during the real quarantine people started and when the Eno was closed, people started discovering, for instance, the trail that's out at Stagville, the Horton Grove Trail. I know a lot of people have discovered. So people have been, I think, branching out a little bit and finding some of the trails that we have in Durham County that maybe hadn't been on people's radar before. But thank you, appreciate all of your work and advocacy. Hi, yes, Commissioner Reck, I'll go right ahead. Thank you, Dave, for the excellent report. I miss being on DOS, I served on DOS for many, many years and it's one of my favorite groups to serve on. I wanna follow up on what Commissioner Jacobs just was talking about. I think that you have excellent priorities and I would like to underscore the interest in focusing on planning for additional trails outside the city limits that was the role of a planner who retired and then has not been replaced. And we actually had a brief discussion on it at our last meeting. When we get to our work plan, I plan to bring it up again. But I just wanted to let you know that that point resonates with us and we will be following up. And thanks again for all your hard work and the great work of the commission. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Reck-Howbs. Anybody else have any questions or comments about the DOS annual report while Dave is here with us? Anybody, okay, well, Dave, thank you again for this great report and all the work that DOS does and thank you especially for raising the alarm over the last couple of weeks about how we need to continue to be vigilant to protect the resources in our community that are used for recreation. So important. And let's just continue to keep our eyes open, I guess. Thank you, Dave. Have a great day. Appreciate you being here. All right, next up is the Historic Preservation Commission. Do we have Chair Katie Hamilton with us? Yeah, I'm here. Awesome. How are you doing, Ms. Hamilton? Good, how are you all? Great, thank you for being with us. You have the floor to tell us about the Historic Preservation Commission annual report. Well, thank you for having me. So in 2019, the Historic Preservation Commission saw a pretty active year. We had two new landmarks created and we saw 37 major certificates of appropriateness come through the commission. Unfortunately, we also lost the landmark property in the wake of the gas explosion. We lost Pascal's Bakery and Studer Baker building. And we also had major damages done to other neighboring structures in the West Village complex. Obviously this pales in comparison to the loss of life that occurred. But we, as a commission, were able to come together with those property owners and review their resulting applications for our certificates of appropriateness. And I think we were all really inspired by Durham and how we all came together in the wake of that tragedy. So if there's any questions, it's all we have. Thank you, Ms. Hamilton for chairing this really important commission. You guys do so much work. And it's been another busy year. I can see a commissioner, Rekhaal, I think you had your hand up to ask some questions, Grady. It's not a question. It's just a comment. Same one I made earlier about possibly considering a joint award with the Appearance Commission. Although I saw in the chat comments that Sarah Young said the idea was explored earlier but not included originally. So perhaps you could have a conversation with Sarah Young and find out what the history is. And if it's some obstacle that existed then but doesn't exist now, maybe it could be pursued. Yeah, I think we'd love to explore that with them. Thank you. Anyone else have any questions or comments from Ms. Hamilton while she's with us about the Historic Preservation Commission's annual report? All right, Wim Sandleton, thank you again for logging on and being with us in this inaugural virtual experiment we're doing with the Joint City Accounting Planning Committee. Appreciate all your good work and look forward to hearing from you again next year. All right, thank you guys. Have a good one. All right, the last of our 2019 annual reports comes to us from the Planning Commission. Chair Hyman, I know you guys had an interesting night. Was it last night? And I appreciate you being here bright and early with us this morning. The floor is yours, Chair Hyman. Thank you for recognizing that we had an interesting night. It was our first real public hearings in the Zoom environment. I'm going to comment on two areas and then I want to defer to our liaison, Grace, who has some additional information. We have an extensive annual report for you with lots of details, but I want to add this. The commission met several times outside of regular meetings to discuss the comprehensive plan engagement and implementation. The staff provided presentations to the commission specific to how to develop or how development is reviewed and approved after the zoning stage, including site plan review and stormwater requirements. This was something that was very educational for us because as you know from watching this process and from approving them when they get to your level that there are many intertwining levels to this and processes. And so for us, it helped to understand at least how all of this was working. So I'm going to defer to Grace at this time. We have lots of numbers, cases and accomplishments. So Grace, if you're there. I'm here. Good morning. I'm a Smith. How are you today? I'm doing great. Thank you. Thank you. Nice background, by the way. Excuse me? Nice background. Thank you for joining us. It's awesome. I really appreciate being able to use it. So I wanted to point out very quickly one thing that might be obvious to some folks. The executive summary on the memo, the front, the very first memo, the one from me to the planning director has a typo in the first paragraph and I apologize. It says 2018. It should say 2019. I had a little bit of PTSD after the malware attack and was trying to get my documents in order and I just missed that. So I apologize. At any rate, we have had a very busy year as Ms. Hyman said. You can see in the second page that we acted on 24 zoning map changes, six plan amendments and seven UDO text amendments and one plan in the annual work program. In addition to all of the other training and meetings that we did outside of our regular planning commission meetings, which I'll have to commend the planning commission. They have been extremely diligent and active with us, very involved. They come to the meetings outside of the regular meetings and they're very excited to learn more about the comprehensive plan and any other educational opportunities that we can present to them. So I'm here if you have any other questions, other than that, I just wanted to make sure that you knew that I know it's the 2019 annual report, not the 2018 annual report. So thank you. And just one final comment. It has been an honor and a privilege to work with such a dedicated and hardworking team of individuals and this is my sixth year, which means that I'm getting to the end of my term. And I just wanted to say it has been an honor and a privilege. Thank you. Are there any questions? Thank you, Chair Hyman. You get your long service and just so grateful for this report and the great work that the planning commission does. Does anybody have any questions or comments? I think Commissioner Jacobs, yes, you had your hand up. Well, I just want to recognize you, Elaine, for your service on the planning commission and you've done a great job in your roles and here as the lady is on. So thank you. I just want to recognize you. Thank you, I appreciate that. Yeah. Commissioner Rekhalker, right ahead. I also want to thank Elaine and the planning commission. You did it just a superb job this past year, putting in many extra meetings on the expanding housing choice initiative and we appreciate those efforts. I also want to say that we don't get very many zoning and planning cases coming to the board, but when we do, we really look at the comments made by individual planning commission members and we value their input greatly. We think that we spend a lot of time and thought on those comments and they mean a lot. So please relay that to your membership. I certainly will, since we have hearings this afternoon. Okay, thank you. Council Member Middleton, go right ahead. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to associate myself with Commissioner Jacobs and Rekhalker's comments and extend them in just commending and thanking Chair Hyman for her remarkable work. The competence and temperament that you've brought to this position has taken a very high bar, I think raised it even higher for those that will come behind you. So just on behalf of a grateful city and those of us that are kind of fledgling in this leadership thing, thank you for the standard you've set and for your service. God bless as you go forward. Thank you so much. And Madam Chair, I'm not Madam Chair, Mr. Chair. I'm so used to saying Madam Chair. Yes, Commissioner Howard. And then the Mayor Pro Tem will be next. Go right ahead, Commissioner Hamilton. I want to add my thank you to, it's been exceptional, Elaine, the work that you've done and given some of the other challenges that you've had. You have been exceptional. And I just want to say thank you and I appreciate, really appreciate the work that you do and the commitment that you have been. And hopefully you won't go anywhere. I know that we need to keep you doing the kind of work that you enjoy and the contribution that you are to this community. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, so Mayor Pro Tem Johnson, go right ahead. You're still muted. Yeah. Am I good? Great, thank you. I just wanted to join the chorus of appreciations and also echo Commissioner Reck how that those comments are really helpful when we get a zoning item in the agenda. I read the memo and then I look for planning commissioner comments and they've been, I feel like over the course of my time on council, they've gotten longer and more useful like we're getting more people giving us more detailed information, probably because we have more complex zoning cases as the amount of developer land in the county shrinks and development increases. But yeah, I've really appreciated those and just want to thank you as well for your service on the board. And I'm pretty sure you're not going anywhere. Durham is not the sort of place you just up and leave. So. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. We're magic here. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Does anybody else want to get in on telling Elaine how awesome she is and how great the planning commission has been this year? This is your chance. This is the time. Anybody? No, all right. Well, the great thing about going last is that everything's been said but not everybody's had a chance to say it. So I will just say what I said at the beginning is that your service has been exemplary. We greatly appreciate it. The last year has been an extraordinary year in the life of the planning commission. Sorry, my notifications are out of control here. You're hearing all my dings. The, especially around expanding housing choices and the time and energy and thoughtfulness that y'all put into helping the city council and the county commission think about that issue, really exemplifies what the planning commission, what their role is in this process. And we're just, I'm just so grateful for that. Pat, did you have something you wanted to add here because you popped into my feed? Yeah, Mr. Chair, just a quick moment to really just add staff's voice to appreciating Chair Hyman and her incredible work. In addition to the outstanding work she's done with planning commission, she also helped the planning department and the city and county tremendously in attending and kicking off each of our large public outreach sessions last fall. And to have her voice as part of that conversation and helping frame that conversation was incredibly helpful. So I just wanna publicly recognize you, Elaine, for that work, which we really appreciate. So thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, if there are no other questions or comments for Chair Hyman on the planning commission annual report or anything else that anybody else wants to say about Elaine, I wanna thank you again, Elaine, for being with us this morning. After your interesting night last night, we look forward to seeing the results of that work before the city council in a not too distant future. Thank you. Alrighty, I think that's it for our annual reports. So I just wanna sum up by saying thank you to all of our resident volunteers who chair these important groups and our staff who serve as the important liaison for them and everyone who logged in to talk to us about their work this morning. Next up is item number eight, conference of plan update. And I believe Scott Whiteman from the planning department is here to talk to us about that. Scott, hello, Scott. Hi, good morning, everyone. Awesome, thank you for joining us. The floor is yours. Sure, good to see you all. Chris, can you pull up the, oh, there you go. Way ahead of me. So way back in February, we provided an update on the conference of plan where we were, what are, we gave you some results from our first phase, the listing and learning and the ambassador's work. And we had shared some of our lessons learned and how we were going to change some of our approaches based on those lessons. State the obvious, there's kind of a lot has happened since February. So we are now looking to how we can adapt our process to continue work on the conference of plan in a COVID-19 environment where in-person engagement will probably not be safe for some time. So what I want to do this morning is gonna give you a high level brief overview of what our strategy we're planning for, at least until the end of this calendar year. We would love to hear feedback from all of the members on our direction so that we can understand if we're on the right track or not before we get too far along. So kind of in a nutshell, what our plan is for the, and for the rest of 2020, we will continue the technical work that on the comprehensive plan. We'll be adapting to a remote environment. We'll probably, we'll reshuffle some of those tasks to confront load some of our technical work that would have been spread out amongst the life of the project. We can do those since those would require less person to person contact. We will ask that we pause any final decision-making by the governing bodies until in-person engagement is safe again. And we'll continue to experiment with virtual or remote engagement techniques. We will try to refine the ones that work and if we find ones that are really effective, we will let you know and we'll keep doing them. If we find ones that aren't effective, then we'll also let you know and we will not do those types of engagements anymore. Next slide. So we have had some activities with engagement since the February JCCP meeting. We had our last in-person outreach team meeting on March 5th. I believe there is a, I believe I got that wrong in the memo said it was March 4th. It was actually March 5th. If that date sounds familiar, that was the day before the city and county got hit with the malware attack. It's kind of the last normal day in government. We had a virtual boards and commissions and committees meeting on April 28th. We used a Zoom platform for that. As far as I know, it was the very first virtual community meeting that we've ever had in the planning department. We also had a virtual outreach team meeting, via Zoom on May 12th. We also in March released all of the raw data from the listening and learning and the ambassador sessions and in May released a summary of those results. So some of the near-term technical tasks we'll be working on in the next year. This is the stuff that can be mostly staff led with some feedback and guidance from our outreach team. We will continue to update this board and all of our other teams on our progress on these. Continue to get feedback and guidance. So we'll be working on our place types and growth management strategies, the land use element of our comprehensive plan. Place types are what's the next generation of the future land use map. There'll be more three-dimensional in nature where the place types will include character use mix, intensity and public service demands. We'll continue to work on a new growth management strategy, effectively in a new urban growth area. We will develop and populate place type GIS layers. I wanna thank the City County GIS for helping me and my team get, we're now, we now have, are fully capable to do GIS work remotely as of last week. We wanna develop a set of land use metrics that show the effectiveness of our new land use plan. We will be working with the Triangle J Council of Governments on a model land use model that will test, basically test how our comprehensive plan meets our metrics. This is something we are partnering with water management on the long range water resources plan, as well as the MPO on the 2050 metropolitan transportation plan. We also begin initial scenario development for when there's key choices to be made on land use decisions. Next slide, Chris. So for the element of the plan, we're calling Equal Development and Infrastructure, how we plan for the city as class sets, but do it in an equitable way. We are currently working on developing a set of equity indicators. We will work with our partner departments in the city and the county on developing level of service standards for all of our services and doing inventory of infrastructure needs. We will work to identify equity impact areas that can serve to inform the capital improvement plan process and growth management framework. We'll work with our budget and finance offices to develop a physical model for future growth. And we will continue meeting with the staff technical team, which is made up of internal city and county and DPS departments. I should note that we also in the virtual meeting of the staff technical team. So even though we can't do in-person engagement for the time being, we will continue to try to communicate engagement and keep our community informed and involved. We are going to work on developing a communications plan for our internal use that will be based on, turn our planning jargon into plain English, which is one of always a challenge for us. One thing we did at our last in-person outreach team meeting was to develop a group of committees or working groups from our outreach team. They wanna be more involved in doing work to help with the comprehensive plan. So we engaged and got interest from members on developing smaller working groups to do communication, engagement and data analysis. So we will work with them to find virtual ways for them to meet in the coming months. We will also, oh, Chris can you go back one slide. We will also continue to work with our engagement ambassadors, which as we noted in February was one of our most successful ways on making our engagement more equitable. And we will work also with our partners and city office of performance and innovation to find a way for a more focused, virtual remote outreach strategies that they can help us with so that we can continue to provide stipends to them. All right, now the next slide. We wanna try to do a better job of regularly updating and communicating via email and social media. We're gonna work on a better and more robust website. We're now, that was originally hosted by the consultant. We now have the management of that. We'll also explore what we're calling analog communication methods, text, mail, radio and TV or anything else we may be able to explore that will help reach folks who may not be as digitally inclined as others. And then we'll also refine the strategies for focused outreach for the groups that we know we missed in the first round, primarily for youth, our rural residents and our Hispanic and Latino community. We also wanna bring you all some near-term implementation items so we don't have to wait until 2022 to start making progress on implementing our comprehensive plan. One thing you'll hear about more later in this meeting is policies, processes and fee structure for development agreements. We also work in the very near-term on some COVID-19 response text amendments to help our small businesses and institutions recover from the economic impacts of COVID and make our zoning rules more flexible to accommodate them. We'll work with our staff technical team to come up with a smart annexation policy and we'll also be working on interim policies for rapidly suburbanizing areas like the ones in Southeast Iran which it was near and dear to the planning commission's heart after last night. We'll also look to identify any other UDO text amendment opportunities to help implement the policies of the comprehensive plan in the near-term before it's finally adopted. So in February, we told you that our plan was to have a set of community goals that we wanted both the city council and the county commission to adopt in August or September. We believe that the best strategy right now is to pause any adoption of the goals until we can start doing in-person engagement again. We were, our original plan was to work with the community on those in March, April, and May, which turns out this thing's happened would have been the worst possible time to do that. We will try to use the input we got from listening and learning to have some key themes to help guide the technical work in the interim and as soon as we know it's possible to do in-person engagement, we will work to reallocate our resources to get this phase of the plan moving as quickly as possible again. So lastly, I wanna see if you have any questions or feedback for us. I know most of the members of my team are on the call so they can help build me out if you have any particularly hard questions. So thanks for letting me update you on that and happy to answer any questions. Well, thank you, Scott. I don't think any of us can truly understand how incredibly challenging it is to try to lead the work on our comprehensive plan update under the current circumstances. And I just wanna say at the outset how much I appreciate the real thoughtfulness that's gone into not only what you're doing but what you're not doing during this time. I think that's gonna be something we have to continue to look at and think about and talk about as we go forward with this. Okay, so now is the time for questions for Scott about the comprehensive plan update. And gosh, look at that. It's Commissioner Reckow with a question or comment. Go ahead, Commissioner, you have the floor. Okay, thank you, Scott, for that overview. I really appreciate it. I just wanna follow up on the goals issue because that is a platform for you to then proceed on with development of strategies, et cetera. If we have another surge or two in the upcoming year, do you really feel that you can't proceed to develop goals without in-person meetings? Could you look at some virtual convenings of people maybe I've seen platforms where people can get broken down into smaller groups to provide input, things of that nature. Our North Carolina Association of County Commissioners has effectively used those strategies to get pretty good conversations going, just a thought. Yeah, we'll definitely, we'll use our outreach team as a way to effectively test drive some ways to do that. And we'll see, we definitely wanna try to move it forward in the meantime and we'll continue to reassess if it looks like in-person engagement is gonna be unsafe for a really long time. We'll come back with you for, we'll have to reassess our strategy, but we just wanted to make sure that we could successfully keep it moving for the next seven months, basically, understanding what we know today. So, yeah, I appreciate that one of the biggest challenges is we wanted to have the goals adopted early so that we could have direction from all you all about how we should move forward with adoption of the plan. So that is, that's a challenge we're gonna, and we'll come back to you in several months and let you know where we are. Yeah, I would be interested at the next regular meeting of this group to get an update and you said you feel as though you have themes that you got from the first outreach sessions might be interesting to hear what those themes were. Yeah, we can definitely do that. Thanks. Great, thank you, Commissioner Reck. How next up is Councilman Romitilton who let me know in the chat he would like to go next. Councilman Romitilton, the floor is yours and then that Commissioner Jacobs will get to you next. Thank you, Brother Chair, I appreciate you. And Scott, good to see you always. I wanna commend you guys on your work. I was struck by the line in the summary where you're recommending that we don't take in, I'm paraphrasing, substantive steps until we can safely do in-person engagement again. I wanna commend you and congratulate you and the team on the work. Sometimes declarations of equity have kind of a vaporous ephemeral nature to them until they're actually concretized into policy. It's real sexy when you're kind of floating out there but when you have to do the actual nuts and bolts work it can become uncomfortable for all of us that do it. So I wanna just lean in to that part where we don't make any substantive decisions until it's safe for in-person engagement. This is a theme that I've been intoning across a number of different areas, notwithstanding my personal policy desires and leanings. I think that this is a principle that we should be adopting as a city across the board. A lot of the people we wanna talk to have a hard enough time engaging when there isn't a pandemic before COVID-19 was upon us. So it's now trying to run a race with your legs tied. I totally agree. As a policymaker, listen, my natural inclination or my inclination is to get it done, is to pass something, is to make things happen. That's just reflexive at this point. But it hasn't been a long time yet. It feels like a long time, but it ain't been that long yet since we've been dealing with this. I hear economists talking about that. It might take 10 years for the American economy to recover. So we have crossed a threshold where things will be challenging or will be tested. I do not want to substitute my own personal leanings in the place of the will of the people because I'm grown frustrated or impatient with how long it's taking to get back to normal. These are challenging times, but we're up to it. For the mind likes to say, we have to do what's hard. And I love that phrase. So this is gonna be uncomfortable. It's gonna be daunting for us, but I wanna commend you, Scott, and the rest of the team for actually taking serious what we elected to have said, what we policy makers have said about equity and actually implementing it and concretizing it, making it policy, and then presenting it back to us in concrete forms. So with that said, I wanna associate myself with Commissioner Redkow's comments. I'd like to hear recommendations at the next meeting, but I also would like to say I'm in no rush to get it done because I wanna get it done. I'm impatient. I want us to have and ensure as much engagement, in-person engagement as possible for folk who don't know what Zoom is and who have spotty internet and who may not be able to engage. That's far more important to me than expediency. And I know no one here is making expediency argument. I wanna be very clear about that, but that's far more important to me than expediency. So I wanna thank you for that and continue to hold us to the standards that we say we wanna live by here in Durham. So thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate you. You can catch me at Remiddleton. I definitely don't wanna end up in one of your sermons. Well, I think it cuts both ways, honestly. Having been on the receiving end of those sermons, both good and bad, I can tell you that it's either real good or it's real not. Speaking of really good, Chair Jacobs, I believe you're up next. Thank you. Yeah, look, this is a very difficult time for all of us and there's so many good things that we're in motion before the malware attack and the pandemic. And I know it's really hard for everybody who's been working so hard and so engaged in really transformative things like the engaged Durham effort. And so yeah, I would just, I really appreciate that you're looking, as you mentioned in your PowerPoint, like you're obviously looking at every opportunity, what can you do to keep communicating with people and I just encourage you to keep doing that because I think that with the branding of engaged Durham, there was a lot of excitement around it and I don't wanna lose that engagement that everyone had invested so much in. People like Elaine, she was at my session that I was at, but I think it's important that we keep it going because for instance, there was, I just got an email about stuff happening with the Walltown neighborhood. The problem is that the development is going to keep moving forward and we have to be aware of that. And so that's not gonna stop. I didn't pay attention to your meeting last night, Elaine, but things are gonna keep happening and we also have to make sure that we don't lose sight of that. So again, stuff that's happening around Northgate and the Walltown community, people are mobilizing around that. So please keep doing whatever can be done. And I totally get what you're saying, Mark Anthony, but I have to say that for me, one of the silver linings being very engaged with this pandemic and with all kinds of groups and out of the EOC, the food security group and homelessness and then out of the renewal and recovery task force, there's literally all of these roundtables that are meeting. And to me, one of the silver linings is that people are at home, they have time. I agree it is an equity issue, not everybody has access to Zoom or the internet, but on the flip side, I have been in these meetings with like a hundred people, daycare providers, small businesses, the food security group is now, last meeting I was in over 75 nonprofits food pantry. So there's also a lot of opportunity for engagement that I have never seen before ever. I mean, you can try to do things in person and you also can get, call a meeting or something and not a whole lot of people show up. So the flip side of it is that because people are at home and we have things like Zoom, in a lot of ways, there is a lot of communication and access that was not possible before and people are getting more comfortable with technology. So I would just say for us to keep working on all of that. I'm really glad that you are looking at waiving fees. That's really important right now. We should definitely be looking at whatever we can do to help support people who are trying to do things. I was really shocked to hear, for instance, on our ABC commission report, I guess I didn't realize that we weren't doing permits during the, I don't even know, maybe this is for later on in our meeting, Chair Rhys, but I heard that the building of a new ABC store on Holloway Street like that delayed three months because they couldn't get a permit. So I think we also, I just have a big question about what's happening in terms of our development services and things like that, that that is also that has an economic impact when people can't move forward with things. And I think the other thing that's on my mind is I didn't hear you saying anything about transit. And I'm really concerned also about our transit planning. And I know that we're supposed to be revising Durham County's transit plan. And again, we can say we want to take it slow, but the problem is that we're on grant funding cycles with applied for money at the state and federal level. And if we don't meet deadlines, we miss out on things. So can you talk a little bit about how this timeline with the comp plan, how that impacts our transit planning because obviously the land use and transit and transportation are linked? Certainly. So we will continue to coordinate with the development of the transit plan. I think you all know that the MPO is now taking the project management lead on that. You're absolutely right. There are deadlines in contract with the to develop the transit plan that has a definitive end date. So with the comprehensive plan, there's no, it's a local only decision. So there's no deadline. We can take as long as we need. The only thing driving it is the fact that you all brought up that development is definitely not stopped. And our old comprehensive plan hasn't become more up to date in the preceding months. So we will definitely continue to coordinate with the transit plan to make sure that our land use is planned to coordinate with the transit plan. But because of certain deadlines, the transit plan will have to be, it will have to move forward now. And so they don't have the luxury of pausing any decision-making. So I guess that's definitely a concern for me. Because again, we want our land use and our transportation to be linked. And frankly, I have concerns. I mean, we're really lucky. What we're hearing on the county end is that, for instance, things are not stopping in RTP. Like we're so fortunate that we actually have businesses that are gonna keep expanding and coming here because we have so much in the biopharma and life science industries. And of course, we make vaccines here and we do research into vaccines. And so this is all the stuff that is going to be really important in the next year plus. And so that means people are gonna be jobs and people are gonna move here and blah, blah, blah, which is like development. But it was ironic that we got an update from RTP Foundation just this week. And you probably are seeing this in the news how our area is now considered to be one of the areas that are gonna be more resistant to, we won't feel that economic impacts as much because we're more low density here. But ironically, we heard at our meeting the other reason that we're more attracted is because we have a lousy transit system. And so we're not, people don't take as much transit here, which has been seen as one of the ways that COVID has spread is through transit. So the fact that we don't have a great transit system and people are more car dependent and we have a more sprawling development pattern ironically makes us in a better position, but we don't want that to be our future. So I guess I'm just expressing some of the issues that I see looming for us that I just think we need to be aware of. And I hope we do our best to keep moving forward. All right, thank you, Commissioner Jacobs. Is there anyone who has not had an opportunity to speak to the conference plan update? Let me know. Yes, Chair Hyman, go right ahead. Oh, before you go, Ms. Hyman, just one thing. We are about five minutes over time on this agenda item, but it feels like the most important thing on our agenda. So I'm gonna let that slide for a bit. Okay, thank you, Chair Hyman, go right ahead. Thank you, this will be very quick. I just wanted to make a comment basically to Scott Whitman who has behind the scenes been doing work on not only all the comprehensive plan, but we had to make adjustments that felt like it was overnight. And these individuals have been working behind the scenes to make this happen. I mean, all of the adjustments, there are people in our community that we have to recognize cannot and have not made this adjustment. So that's why in response to Councilman Middleton, we don't want to overlook the inequities are out there while we push forward to make sure that we continue to plan for people who are moving here. We cannot leave individuals behind who right now we're in an environment where there are lots of people that are hurting and hurting badly. So to echo Chair Reese's comments, a lot had to happen behind the scenes and it did, but these individuals in the planning department have been working night and day. They're, as a matter of fact, they're at home, but they're working longer, longer and on a lot of different things in order to be able to accommodate the citizens of this community. And I just don't want that to be lost. We were caught with a subcommittee in March that was working on a text amendment. We could not, you know, I was the chair, I could not get that together. So that's one of those things that's hanging and very important to this community, but it's about, you know, the text amendment for the housing that, and one of those issues, Eleanor, is gonna come up again as to the number of people who can actually live in, you know, in a household. And I think our text amendment has three. There's a need to change it to six. We had the community in lots of vigorous discussion and we shut down in the middle of that. But somehow or another, we want to be able to get back to it and as I said, I've worked with the staff to try to get that done. It's one of the things that I had not finished, but the community is definitely interested in seeing that through. So very briefly, and sorry that I'm over, but I felt that I had to at least make that comment. Thank you. Thank you, Elaine, for those remarks and that recognition of the incredible work our planning department has done to try to move forward the things that actually have to move forward. Are there any other committee members that want to be recognized at this time about this agenda item, the conference of plan update? If you do, please raise your hand virtually or in real life. Seeing none, let me just say, as we close out this item, how much I appreciate the conversation. Obviously, the discussion that we've had here today mirrors what's the conversation that's going on in our community right now about how local government should be responding to the COVID-19 crisis when it comes to community engagement and the work that we do. Council member Middleton is absolutely right. There are, we have to recognize the new reality that we're in and conform our activities accordingly. It's painful, difficult, challenging, can lead to obstacles that we're not foreseen when these decisions are first made. But the commissioners that have spoken, RecCount and Jacobs are also correct in that things are gonna keep moving forward whether we hold the line on public engagement or not. We've got to continue to think about and talk about that and more importantly give staff guidance on what we want them to keep doing and what we want them to pause on as this goes forward. And I think that is a task and a goal that this particular group, Joint City County Planning Committee is uniquely designed to do. It's really our mission, mission critical work during this time is to continue to have those conversations amongst ourselves so staff can have a sense of what needs to go forward. The only thing I wanted to say substantively about this, Chair Jacobs, you made a great point that for many folks, this is a time when they're at home and have the time to engage. And I think that's exactly right. Folks on this call, for example, have that time. But I think to Council member Middleton's point, there is a whole segment of the population that is not sitting at home right now. There's a whole segment of our population that is and has continued to go to work during that time. And you pointed out our lousy transit system. I would, in another context, I'd love to argue with that. I don't think we have a lousy transit system. I think we have an underfunded transit system that works really hard to meet the needs of our community and has continued to do so during the COVID-19 crisis. But, you know, we have to recognize that it's great for those of us who are at home struggling to homeschool our kids in a really bad way while we meet our obligations in these kinds of formats. But there are tons of people in our community that aren't doing that, that don't have that. In fact, their ability to engage is much less now than it was before the COVID-19 crisis. And we have to reckon with that. You know, the whole point of the Engaged Urm Initiative, the whole point behind the animating spirit behind the comprehensive plan update up until the first week of March was that this work is not valid unless we get a more fulsome engagement with folks who are not typically engaged in this kind of work and have not historically been engaged with it. And their input is not optional, it's not a nice tab, it's not a good add-on. It is essential to this work. And yes, absolutely, things have to continue to happen. The transit plan is gonna need to go forward because there's lots of stuff that rolls out of that. And it kind of confounds the plan that we had to sync up transit plan and comprehensive plan update. Totally understand that. But we have to keep all of these considerations front and center, it's not an either or, we gotta figure it out. And I just wanna thank all of you for pushing that conversation forward. We're gonna, it's gonna be a standing item on the agenda to keep talking about this as the Joint City County Planning Committee goes forward. And I hope we can continue to have those conversations and Scott and Pat just to close. As you guys, as y'all get to the point in the work where you're gonna need go-no-go on certain things, I think this is a format where we can advise. And I hope you will continue to bring those things forward as it's necessary. I know this is a topic we could keep talking about for hours, but we don't have hours left in this meeting. So I just wanna give either Scott or Pat an opportunity to say a few words before we move on. And obviously the next item on the agenda we'll also have some salings with this. So Scott or Pat, anything you wanna add before we go? Well, thank you, Chair Rees. And thank you, Scott for that excellent update. I just wanna take a moment to acknowledge the tension that we heard in the conversation between the fact that it is absolutely true that Durham is one of the best positioned cities to recover quickly from the COVID-19 pandemic. Moody's Analytics did a report a couple of weeks ago that identified Durham as number one in the nation in terms of likely quick recovery. I have a lot of conversations with development community members who are telling me that in terms of warehouse, most parts of the office market and certainly residential that there's really almost no impact. Retail and some other uses of that nature will be impacted. So wanna acknowledge that we are gonna continue to face these growth pressures, but I do wanna reiterate briefly what I think some of the points that Commission members Middleton and Rees made, which is that we feel like in order to ensure equity and major wholesale changes to growth strategies and priorities, we have to be able to engage folks that are right now on their essential workers, they don't have access to the internet, they're dealing with childcare, they're dealing with unemployment, they're dealing with mental health or physical health issues, possibly even at COVID itself. And so we have to have in-person interactions and essentially consensus building and collaboration and dialogue to be successful in that. So, but that being said, we do have issues like the transit plan and rapidly suburbanizing areas of Southeast and Eastern Durham, particularly where we have to continue to act and make decisions and we will continue to do that. We are closely, we're no longer leading it, but we are very closely engaged as Scott said with the transit plan and we will ensure that the routing recommendations that come out of that for future transit routes, whether they're fixed router or not, are supportable by the land use and that the conference of plan ultimately reflects that transit plan. We also, in terms of these rapidly suburbanizing areas that planning commission has been struggling with so much recently, I say struggling, expressing valid concerns about our current policies. We are going to bring forward some interim guidance as Scott said, that we think will address the key components of those concerns without making wholesale, permanent, long-standing changes to growth policy that take that collaboration and engagement. So I think we're trying to thread the needle here. If we're missing the mark, you all need to let us know as Chair Reis and others suggested, but we acknowledge the tension and see it and we hope that our work going forward well balances though. So thank you for that opportunity. Thank you, Pat. And thanks for this conversation. Like I said, we're not gonna solve this, these problems today, but I think we've got a good, taking a good opportunity at airing kind of where we're at and we'll keep moving forward. Thank you, Scott and Pat for that. Like I said, we're a little over now. So we'll move on to item number nine of the agenda, the fiscal year 2021 planning work program. And I see the incredible Sarah Young is ready to talk to us about this. Again, I really gotta figure out whether you guys are getting that soon background because it's totally awesome. Sarah, the floor is yours. And thank you for being with us today. Thank you, Chair. We'll be happy to share the background. We can send it to you after the meeting. It's good to see you all. Thank you for the opportunity. You'll be back again. I will repeat a few things just for the benefit of the viewing audience. I see that we do have some viewers right now on YouTube watching the live stream and of course it'll be available afterwards. So to recap, the work program is a requirement of our interlocal agreement that establishes the department as a joint department. And it categorizes our work in terms of the things that we do that are legally required, things that we do that are based on directions from city or county policy, like the fact that we have boards and commissions that we manage or that we provide public information. And then it includes discretionary items, things that we make choices to work on. And that's the part of the work program that really changes year to year. So I know back in February, we had a good conversation about some things that we had proposed and we got some feedback from you all. I wanna touch on those. But first, I wanna mention that there are four items that are new to the work program, but they're not actually new to our work. They were actually started this year. They were included in your memo. One is work on the county transit plan. It's something that was that popped up last year. And of course we started work on it. So while it may show up for the first time on the work program, it's not really new work. The second is an update to the Durham landscape manual. That will be coming forward to you all, probably I think in August at your next meeting. We have also established a departmental racial equity work group. This is incredibly important work in terms of making sure that everything that we do as a department is done through the lens of racial equity. And then we have also drafted and implemented a language access plan. Again, this is part of our efforts in terms of reaching all of our community. So those things while they are new to the work program are things we've already been working on. There are two new proposals that we shared with you all in February. One is adding standards in the unified development ordinance or clarifying them to a better address natural and historic resources. Another is an item about reviewing and implementing outstanding items from adopted open space plans that we already have kind of on the books. And then in addition, you all mentioned last time we met that you wanted us to explore two additional items in terms of open space and environmental planning. One was what would it take to do a flat river open space plan? And the other was what would it take to do an update to the natural heritage program inventory? And so while some information about that is included in the memo, I've asked Carl Colasna who is our open space senior planner to join us since he is kind of the expert in this field and not myself to talk a little bit about those two items since you specifically asked about them. Carl. Thank you, Sarah. So I'll go through the flat river open space plan first. As Sarah mentioned, I and some other people did a little bit of research into what would be involved in doing a plan like that. We estimate that an open space plan would take approximately 12 months and would cost somewhere between 75 and $100,000. That was based on research I did of similar open space plans from similar municipalities in North Carolina that had been done in recent years, particularly in Raleigh. The doing the plan itself would require expertise in a lot of natural sciences and while the planning department certainly has a lot of people with a lot of skills, those are technical expertise that we would need to hire a consultant to do or water quality biodiversity and things like that. Particularly with the focus, as we've been talking a lot today about the focus on equitable engagement and community engagement, particularly in the environment that we're in right now, we would want to make sure that planning staff would work with that consultant closely to devise an engagement strategy that was equitable and certainly would, I imagine would run into some of the same challenges that we're running into with the comprehensive plan. So I think that's everything on the Flat River open space plan. On the natural heritage program update, we were fortunate that actually pretty recently the program director from the natural heritage program, Misty Buchanan reached out to Durham County along with Alamance, Chatham, Orange and Wake counties with a supposed scope for how to update the natural heritage program for in a combined program for those five counties. Her estimate would be that that would take approximately five years and the cost for assuming it was evenly distributed amongst all of those counties would cost about $130,000 over that five year period per county. And that money would be used to hire one full-time and two part-time biologists and they would work with the county with officials to go out, identify sites that needed to be surveyed to actually conduct those surveys to do the reports and then to work with their GIS team to update those layers. I did talk with Misty Buchanan and some other folks in the county in the open space area. So the most recent inventory was done in 1999. So it has been a while. That said, the assessment that was done in the mid-90s was fairly comprehensive. It's our expectation that there probably would not be dramatically new areas of high quality biodiversity that would be found. There may be some, but I think generally what we would expect with an update like that would be modest modifications of the existing boundaries that are there. And unfortunately, due to a lot of development pressures, particularly with the growth over the last 20 years, we would expect that that inventory would probably find areas that were higher quality back then that have degraded to some degree because of development pressures. So I'm here for any other questions or if anybody else has anything else. Thank you. Thank you, Carl. Chair and members of the JCCPC, that's all that we have prepared, but we are here to answer questions. I know Pat is also here and we're happy to hear you for the direction. This is an item that we need you all to make an official recommendation and take a vote so that we can move it forward to the Planning Commission and then to both governing bodies for final approval. Chair Rees, if I might add just a couple of comments. I'm gonna recognize the Planning Director Pat Young for some comments before committee members get a chance to go. Go ahead, Pat, thank you. Yeah, thank you, Chair Rees. And thank you, Sarah, for the report. I asked Sarah to do this report, she did an excellent job, as always, because as you all well know, the areas that are most influenceable by you all's direction are, what we call our discretionary projects, policy projects, small area plans, open space plans. And Sarah did an excellent job characterizing that. I did wanna spend just a moment addressing an issue that Commissioner Jacobs mentioned, which is a status of our Development Services Center and our Development Review activities. At this point, we are going to either meet or come very close, we may be just your work, but we're gonna, our revenue projections for the current year. And as I mentioned earlier, we anticipate review volumes at this time being roughly consistent to what they were earlier this year prior to the pandemic. Obviously, that's something we'll need to very closely track and report to you all on. We'll do that monthly through the managers and then of course in this venue every two months. If we see significant decreases in that, we understand that that may have some impact on our staffing in our work program and we'll make sure to bring that back to you all. But one thing I do wanna emphasize other than the fact that we've seen continued volumes is we have been extremely effective and I wanna give all credit to our staff, particularly Pete Sullivan, our Development Services Center Manager of getting all of our previously, many of our development approvals were previously submitted via paper. And those have all, we've been able to transition those to all digital in a very short period of time because we had done the research and analysis prior to the pandemic on what that would take as that's been on our strategic plan for some time. We did it at very low cost. We've essentially kind of cobbled together different software, Bluebeam, which is the online review software box.com which is a portal to transmit large documents and then payment us to accept payment. So my point in all this is we only, we only shut down permit intake in review for 10 days. And that was really more associated with the malware than the COVID. The malware was on March 6th, as you heard from Scott, the COVID was on March 13th, was when we started to try to move folks out of the building. So we did from March 9th through March, I think it was 16th or 17th, we did suspend taking in new applications. But other than that brief period, we have taken in applications, we've been reviewing applications and approving applications without any delay or other issues or impediments. So if there's a specific case, we need to look into it, we certainly can, but we understand how important this permitting and review is for small businesses to be able to reestablish themselves, do a new improvement, say tents or outside areas for restaurants as an example, Duke University has approached us about having tents outside for classrooms. One of our top priorities is to work with those groups to quickly get that resolved. Bo de Brinski of our team is working with all the different team members, the fire marshal, our inspections department, transportation public works in the city side to make sure we can get use of public rights of way, sidewalks, things for outdoor seating, and really trying to very, very quickly land that. So I did want to take just a minute to drill down on that side of the house and be happy to, and Sarah and I will be happy to take any questions. Great, thanks Pat, that's really important, clarification about where we're at right now. And I think this is the right time for members of the committee to ask questions or make comment at this time. Anybody's interested? Let me know. No, that's it. Okay, well, thanks for this agenda item. I'm kidding. Chair Jacobs, you are up first. Go right ahead. Pat, thank you for some of the comments that you just made. I'm really glad to hear that it was such a short period. I'm not sure what happened with our ABC commission. So I mean, it's great to hear that. And I guess just thinking about everything is different now when you think about what moving forward in this time of COVID. How do you feel like the work plan is gonna be, and I guess, Sarah, you as well, be impacted just for your staff and things like that, just how you feel about what's in the work plan. And so I guess one possible impact may be what you just said, Pat, related to revenues, any other, and of course, just doing plans and community engagement, any other things that you feel like we should all be aware of related to your work? Yeah, thank you for that question, Commissioner Jacobs, that's a very good question. It's something we've spent a lot of time thinking about and working on in the planning department. What we've concluded with our ability to get folks with remote hardware and software, laptops, iPads, and other devices, we really feel like there's only two areas that are gonna be substantially impacted. Other than the two areas I'm gonna mention here, we feel like we can discharge all the duties that are in the work plan throughout, really for the indefinite future, even if this pandemic drags on for some time. But the two areas that have been most problematic are in-person engagement, which we talked about at some length, and we can talk about more if you like, but we do feel like it's probably not safe for engagement to occur in large venues. We may experiment when it's safe with smaller group engagements, maybe ambassador engagements, groups of less than 10 in neighborhoods will continue to report to you all on our experiments and our ideas on that. I say our ideas, our outreach team and our ambassador team's ideas as well, of course. The other, the second area is in-person customer service. Our development services center lobby has been closed since March, I think, 17th or 18th, but we have publicized broadly the fact that we are available through the telephone and through online, various online media. And what we have said is that if somebody does not have access to a telephone or a digital platform, we will undertake an in-person meeting with social distancing and other mitigation measures at a city hall or offices. And so what we've committed to do is assess both the criticality of those in-person customer service items and the safety of delivering them. And we have committed to doing that on a monthly basis. The city manager authorized us to continue to do virtual remote only through July 6th. And then at the middle or the end of this month, we will fully reassess, again, that criticality for the need and then safety of operating those in-person services. Our experience has been that the vast majority of our customers, well over 99%, have access either to a phone or a computer. So we've been able to meet their needs and deliver services effectively. And that's what we see. So hope I've answered your question. Thank you for that question. Be happy for any follow-up. Okay, great. Well, thank you. And in terms of the follow-up related to the plans, I mean, obviously it doesn't make sense to move forward with something like the Flat River Open Space Plan based on, first of all, the costs right now, but also, you know, you can't, you know, the comp plan is one thing that's already in process. We don't wanna start a plan when we can't do real engagement. I do hope that we will move forward with the Natural Heritage Plan update. That sounds doable. And I think it's important as we are, I think a lot of our natural areas are under threat in Durham County. And we don't really know the impact that we've had in the last 20 years to these areas. And I do think it's important to get a better idea of on the ground conditions. And so that we can understand ways that we need to try to protect the areas that we do have left. I just would like to understand, are we, in other words, discussion in general about the fact that we don't have an environmental open space planner anymore? And this has come up before just, just concerned that the open space plans and things like that are sometimes not getting, feels like maybe not getting, they're full attention. I think ironically, again, with COVID, a lot of people are forced to be outside. And some people are exercising more, taking walks. Maybe those will be habits using the ATT. And maybe those will be habits that continue beyond COVID with people wanting to be able to get outside and exercise outside and all that. So I just, what could you tell us where we're at with that idea? Sure, so I'll start and then I'll turn it over to Sarah to talk a little bit more about the costs and next steps and the natural heritage inventory piece and to reiterate or clarify in the next table. We do have an open space planner with the department and that's Carl Colosna who you heard from earlier today. And I think Carl does an excellent job. He's got a background in this area, very qualified and competent and has done an outstanding job supporting DOS and working in this area. What we don't have, and I absolutely acknowledge this is a full-time open space planner, someone who works exclusively in this area. We have not had that since the retirement of Helen Youngblood about four years ago now. We needed to have, because of our resource limitations and because of the fact that we're doing the comprehensive plan in-house, we needed to have someone like Carl who's got the ability to do both the open space planning and generalist planning. And we're incredibly lucky to have Carl in that role. We certainly can talk in future years about having a dedicated position to that if it's needed or desired. But we feel that Carl's been able to support all of these plans. I do want to acknowledge as I think I have previously that we need to do a better job in implementing the urban open space plan particularly and then some of the other plans that have not been fully implemented. As you heard from Sarah, we're going to do, we're going to focus on identifying some critical priority implementation pieces and working on that during the coming fiscal year. So Sarah, do you want to add to that? I don't think there's anything else I can add. I completely agree with Pat. We're trying to use Carl as best we can with the limitations that we have, but he is doing double duty, doing open space work as well as comprehensive plan support for us. Okay, thank you. Can everybody hear me right now? This is Charlie Reece, by the way. Yes. So I need to make everybody aware that in my home we're having a significant bandwidth problem as I think all four members of my household are currently on Zoom calls for various reasons. So I have deactivated my video to try to make sure I get at least some bandwidth to this call. So for that reason, my video, I've turned it off and how I see the video of other participants is basically I have still frames for I think four people. I suspect Council Member Middleton also turned his video off for bandwidth purposes, if only because I think he's, I know that he has had similar problems in the past that I'm having right now. So we are all gonna do the best we can right now. Commissioner Jacobs, did you have anything else you wanted to add to the concerns that you've raised and the response of Pat and Sarah? No, I appreciate the responses I received. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Commissioner Jacobs. Does anybody else have any questions or comments they wanna raise about the work plan? Mr. Chair, if I could just- Mr. Chair, question right now, go right ahead. So I had raised the need to do more open space planning at either last meeting and I appreciate the excellent follow-up that we have in the staff report. I agree with what Commissioner Jacobs said related to the Flat River Open Space Plan doesn't make sense to start that now. I actually agree with the staff report on the natural heritage update. I'm not, you raised the issue in the staff report that it may not generate much new information that would be valuable. If these other counties decide they want to do it, and we would be the only outlier then I guess we should proceed. But as you say, it's not clear what we gain. I was actually involved with the last update. So I know quite a bit about it. What I would say confirming what Commissioner Jacobs said is that we have a situation where there's increased demand for trails and greenways in our community. More people are out walking. I do get complaints that the places that are open are crowded because people have so few other outlets. And it's positive in the sense that people appear to be outdoors exercising more, perhaps getting healthier. So I am pleased to hear that we're going to look at plans we've already done that are in the can, so to speak, and begin to get more of them implemented. That really resonates with me. We do have DOS did lead an effort years ago to do an urban open space plan. I would love to see more of that implemented. Getting trails and greenways that are convenient to our neighborhoods, which is what the urban open space plan does. You don't even have to drive places. You can actually walk or bike to a trail. To me, that would be a wonderful activity. So getting more of those going would be great. And I think what we need to do is look at cost effective ways to respond to the needs that exist post COVID. And that would definitely be one of them. So again, I actually really agree wholeheartedly with most of the points made in this staff report. Thank you. Great, thank you, Commissioner Reckow. Does staff wanna respond to any of that right now? No. I just appreciate the comments on Commissioner Reckow. Thank you, cherries. We will continue to update you all on whether or not we have any of those other partner counties that wanna engage with the state on updating the natural heritage area. But I certainly agree as the staff report said that the impact of that I think would be modest. So we'll keep you up to date on that. If I could add one quick thing to what Pat said, cherries. And that is that I think the thing that will have the bigger impact is the other work program item about strengthening the standards and the UDO about what we do with sites that are identified as natural heritage sites. Right now, the biggest problem is that there's not really real regulations. It just says, hey, take care of these, be nice to these. That's not really an enforceable way to manage those areas. And so I think the other work program item will actually be much more meaningful in terms of really protecting those. Great, thanks, Sarah. I appreciate that. Councillor Middleton, do you wanna get in on this? Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate it. Good to see you back. Pat and Sarah, always good to see you. Thanks much. Forgive me if this question is off topic, Patrick, but how far away are we from our first update about the impact? Well, intended or unintended impacts of EAC, expanded housing choices on our city and our county. Yeah, that's a great question, Councillor Middleton. So as you'll recall, when that was passed, we promised a six month update. That was, we had planned to do that in late March or early April. It was right when the COVID was occurring. We did provide this body, I believe a kind of sneak preview in February, if I recall, on some of the impacts that were at that time, but we will do, at our August meeting of this group, we'll do a deeper, a much deeper dive of how many permits have been pulled, where they are, what the impact is, and share as much data as we have. And we're continuing to work to develop the data. The county had requested that we expand that data assessment. We're working to do that right now with partners, both non-profit and some of our other community partners, to get that additional data. So you'll hear about more on that at your August meeting. Thank you so much. And I wanna commend you on the work you've been doing. I think the work plan looks great. As you know, that's gonna be critically important for us to kind of do a self-check on how we're doing, our commitments to equity. So I appreciate that commitment and the work plan looks great to me. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thanks, Pat and Sarah. Thank you, Councilor Middleton. Anybody else want to ask a question or raise a comment about the 2021 work plan or program, excuse me. Speak now or forever, hold your peace. Okay, so as the chair, I just want to say very briefly that this is a fantastic conversation, exactly what we need to be talking about right now as we try to figure out what isn't as a possible. Appreciate all the work. I could have said nothing and just said, I agree with everything Councilor Middleton said, but that's nobody's style on this call. So just let me say thanks so much to everybody for your questions and comments. And thanks to Sarah for presenting the work program and to all our staff for keeping us where we need to be in terms of the upcoming fiscal year. Next up is item number 10, Development Agreements. This is the last item on our agenda and want to welcome is Michael Stock with us. Yes, I am and I'm trying to chair Reese, I have to still more problem as you with multiple kids on Zoom. So I may be popping in and out, unfortunately. I just want to stop you guys one second. I think Sarah said that action needed to be taken on that last issue. Thank you for keeping us on topic. Let's go back to item number nine. Sarah, what is the action that the committee needs to take on the work program? We need a recommendation from the committee and that will then allow us to move forward to the planning commission and the governing bodies. So hopefully review recommendation for approval of the work program. Okay, so I am open, the floor is open for a motion to approve, recommend approval of the proposed fiscal year 21 work program. All right, so moved by Mayor Pertin Johnson, second by Council Member Middleton, a vote I would be in favor of approval. And if we could have that roll call vote now, that would be great. I think that was Commissioner Reco, I was gonna do it, but then she did it first. Commissioner Reco. And I'm also keeping my video off for bandwidth problems. It appears to be a epidemic today. All right, hold on a couple of notes here. Yes, okay. Was that second by Ms. Johnson? No, that was Council Member Middleton. So I'll call the roll now. Commissioner Member Ms. Reco. Aye. Council Member Johnson. Aye. Commissioner Howardan. Aye. Commissioner Jacobs. Aye. Council Member Reese. Aye. Council Member Mark Anthony Middleton. Middleton, aye. Planning Commissioner Member Ms. Hyman. Aye. Kerry 7-0. Great, thank you. Thank you, Brian, for coming up on task with the work we're actually supposed to do here. Appreciate it very, very much. Mr. Chair. Yeah, go ahead, Pat. Yeah, if I might, I'm gonna very briefly introduce this to next up, our final item before I turn it over to Michael Stock and Don O'Toole is also available on this. I wanted to just frame this out a little bit because many of you may not be familiar with development agreements. You're gonna hear a lot more from Michael, but really what a development agreement is is another tool to allow site-specific development that has characteristics of a contract rather than only a zoning action and that it's a tool that's been used by our Peer Cities of Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Charlotte, and many other municipalities has not been used previously in Durham. We were approached by a development group that has a project that will be appearing before Council in near future on Farrington Road. As everybody in this call knows, Southwest Durham is a part of our community that has particularly that part of Southwest Durham, a very small and limited amount of what we call organic or naturally occurring affordable housing or permanent affordable housing. So it's an area where there's very high need for affordable housing. We have a developer who is really sincerely interested in pursuing a proffer on affordable housing, but they were not able to meet the coordinates requirements for our affordable housing density bonus. And as you all know, the affordable housing density bonus has been used only once and that project has not been completed yet, which is the new sheets on Duke Street, that there'll be affordable housing near that, but only one time in over 30 years. So we felt that it was worth exploring more flexible tools that would give Council or the commissioners, depending on which body has authority, a greater pallet of options and tools to evaluate and assess development, what appropriate development is on a site while achieving incredibly important community goals such as affordable housing, even things like workforce and other areas that we don't typically deal with in Zonings can be incorporated. So I just wanted to give you that context, which is how we got here. I think we think this tool could probably be used more broadly, much more broadly, honestly going forward and I'll turn it over to Michael Stock to give you more on that. Thank you for that opportunity. Great, thank you, Pat. Before we get going, it looks like Commissioner Rec, I would like to be recognized and I'm happy to do that, go ahead. I just wanted to follow up with Pat and ask him a question. My question is when I looked at the agenda item and the attached legislation, it appeared to apply just to cities. Do counties have the ability to do development agreements also? I believe so, but I'll let Michael answer that. He and Donna, two of our staff, have looked at this in much more detail. Yes, yes, we attached the city version, but there's a carbon copy county version also. And we referenced the statutes in the memo. And I vaguely remember a discussion like this years ago and at the time it's, I think I remember that our staff was recommending that we not do it, but when I read through this, it certainly made great sense to me at this point. So I don't know, but okay, thank you. All right, thank you, Commissioner Rec. How it looks like Chair Jacobs would also like to get in before Michael talks. You have the floor. I just want to thank the staff for looking at this. I think this is really important. Again, as we tying into our comprehensive plan and what the community feels like our priorities are and how it can be another tool for us to be able to make sure that the community is benefiting from the development that's happening. So I appreciate you all being proactive on looking at this. Brian, have you been able to be involved in this as our county attorney on land use? You're muted. I did get a copy of what Don and Mike had been working on. I think it was yesterday or the day before yesterday. So I have looked at it. I haven't thoroughly reviewed it. But I was looking forward to hearing the presentation today. Okay, so obviously we look forward to hearing your input. And I really like your changing backgrounds, by the way, for joining them. Reminiscing of the good old days. Yeah, right, all the places that I know you wish you were right in there. Yeah, so what I just wondered, what are the next steps then for this? Why don't we hear them? Okay. Yeah, I would recommend hearing Michael's presentation. Oh, okay. We'll address that. Okay. Great, okay. Well, Michael, I think it's your turn to go ahead and present the item. Thank you. It's gonna be tandem as I try to get my video on. There it is. Tandem between myself and Don. Pat did an excellent job of introducing it and stole a bit of my thunder in terms of what I was going to talk about. But I do want to emphasize it's an additional regulatory tool. Commissioner Reckow is right. There's been very little or to no experience with development agreements to this point, mainly because the UDO, with the adoption of the UDO, expressly prohibited using development agreements. And we took out that prohibition back in 2016, recognizing that there was no reason to really put one hand behind our back in terms of a statutory allowance that was available to us if we so chose to use it. Don, we'll get into the legal aspects of it in much more detail, but to reiterate a bit of what Pat said, it is the ability for the city or county. And there's a 160A version for the city that we reference in the memo and there's a 153A version for the county. And when the enabling legislation, 160D comes into effect, it merges it and applies to both city and counties as one document. It allows either a city or county to enter into a legal agreement or, for lack of a better term, contract with a person or entity to establish the rules, conditions and even procedures for development on a particular site. And ostensibly, that agreement would benefit the applicant, the entity proffering the development agreement in terms of assuring regulations over the period of developing the site, a timetable or even additional benefits that they perceive important, that they couldn't get through zoning in turn for community benefits that the city would not otherwise get through zoning that they feel are really valuable with this agreement. It would be approved through an ordinance, it does involve a public hearing and it allows for regulations that work in tune with zoning or separate from zoning. And when we get back after Don speaks, I'm gonna hand it over to Don now, but after Don talks about the regulatory, the statutory walkthrough of it, we'll get into what we're looking for initially with the text amendment. So I'll hand it off to Don now. Good morning, everyone. This is Don, a tool from the city attorney's office and Mike, just like Pat stole your thunder, I think you stole a lot of my thunder. Sorry. I did wanna clarify one thing. I know our city council and probably the county commissioners have seen agreements previously that are called development agreements. So you may be wondering what's different about this. I know for example, the redevelopment of the police headquarters here in the city, there's a development agreement associated with that. And that is just purely a contract, but the development agreements that we're talking about here, these are development agreements that are actually authorized by statute and there are specific statutory provisions that apply to the approval of those agreements, what can be included, sort of what the terms need to look like. And so this is our first experience with this kind of development agreement. If city council and the county commissioners decide to move forward with something like this. I thought it might be helpful just in the statute itself, there's a stated reason for why a local government might want to enter into a development agreement. And I think this is helpful in understanding what it might do. And what it says is development agreements permit communities and developers to experiment with different or nontraditional types of development concepts and standards while still managing impacts on the surrounding areas. And so there is one specific development under consideration that will be under consideration at some point in the future, but that's the kind of thing that a local government and a developer can accomplish through a development agreement. As Mike said, the governing body has to approve a development agreement. It's approved through an ordinance. So in a lot of ways, it's just like approving zoning generally. There has to be a public hearing and ordinance is approved. And one of the things you might see when a development agreement comes forward is there may be a related rezoning item with it. And those would likely work in tandem. There would be a development agreement and a rezoning. And like I said, those would work together. There used to be a prohibition in law that development agreements could only be applied to parcels of property greater than 25 acres. A couple of years ago, the legislature removed that requirement. So there are no size requirements on parcels that can be subject to a development agreement. Public hearing is required. Notice of a public hearing, just like a rezoning hearing has to be given in newspaper on the property. And there's one additional requirement. And that is that the city or county would need to make the public aware of a location where they could actually see the proposed development agreement and get a copy of it so that they could comment on it. There are provisions in the statute that specifically say the kinds of things that a development agreement must address. Things like duration have to be addressed. Permitted uses that are gonna be allowed on the parcel could be addressed in a development agreement. Population density, building types, intensity of use on the parcel, placement of structures on the site and even design elements could be addressed through a development agreement. In addition, usually a developer wants some public facilities, city, water and sewer. Those are elements that would likely be addressed in a development agreement. Any reservations or declarations of land that the local government would like to see. And then there's a more general category, a description of any conditions, terms, restrictions or other requirements determined to be necessary by the local government for the public health safety or welfare of its citizens. Like I said, and Mike said this as well, typically development agreements require timing provisions when various things need to be accomplished and they usually have a termination date. The final thing is a development agreement is a pretty official document. It gets approved through an ordinance and it's also required to be filed with the register of deeds office and it's a binding agreement that is tied to the land. So if the developer that we enter the agreement, if they transfer the rights, the subsequent developer would still need to comply with the terms of a development agreement. And Mike, I think you were gonna take it from here and talk about how you expect planning to move forward after this meeting. Yes, thanks Don. So we determined, as I mentioned before, we removed the prohibition on development agreements through a UDO text amendment, one of our very famous omnibus text amendments back in 2016, we didn't put in any affirmative text in there, so technically development agreements are permissible within the city and the county, but we felt with consultation with the city attorney's office specifically that there were a couple of things that were prudent to add it back into the UDO in relation to development agreements, at least at this point in time. The first is an affirmative statement that we can do development agreements. Secondly, that there wouldn't be any modifications to the UDO unless expressly indicated within the development agreement. And that thirdly, and this is upon research we did with other development agreements and some law research, that the development agreements couldn't add in uses that the zoning doesn't already allow. So if it was a development agreement in a residential district, we couldn't do a development agreement that would allow an office building per se. So it had to be at least consistent with that, with those zoning allowances. So that, and that we reiterated that within the memo too, that we would look forward to bringing that language hopefully to planning commission. At least I'm aiming for hopefully the July planning commission, if not the August one, to get the adoption going for that. So then the governing bodies could see this hopefully in early fall. Great. That's, thank you, Michael. That's fantastic. Anything else, Michael and Don, you guys wanna talk about before we have some more comment or questions? I'm finished at this point. Great. Awesome. Commissioner Reckow, I believe you are up next. Well, I applaud this being brought forward. When I read it, I thought, great. We need to go for it. So thank you and let's move it. Let's make it a priority to move forward. Awesome. Thank you, Commissioner Reckow. Anybody else have a question or comment on this item? Councilmember Middleton, go right ahead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you, Mike and Donald. Thanks, good to see you. I called Don Spock. So if you ever hear me say Spock, you know, I'm referring to Councilor O'Toole. So good to see you, Spock. This is a learning thing for me. So bear with me a couple of questions because I think, Mike, you may have, Don, you may have alluded to it earlier. I have seen the phrase denomenclature development agreement before. So I just wanna be clear on the distinction of this one. First question, would development agreements under this rubric be inviolable or non-amendable by subsequent office holders? No, they are subject to amendment and the terms for amendment would need to be included in the development agreement, but there are also statutory requirements. A new, it would need to go through a public hearing process again if it were to be amended. So future office holders would have the wherewithal to vacate these agreements or amend them with due process. Is that correct? Yes. And secondly, in so far as they have to be in harmony with existing zoning requirements, I'm curious as to what then a type of leeway or creativity to these development agreements, I understand about timing and timetables and stuff. Is it experimentation with architecture or aesthetics or building materials? What type of things would this allow us to do that would still have to be harmonized with the zoning or existing zoning requirements? Mike, do you want me to take a stab at that? You can if you want to. Or you go, Mike. Basically with our research and understanding, this can either supplement zoning requirements or provide separate development requirements that aren't tied to zoning beyond the basic use of land. So if the zoning wasn't allowing for, through zoning requirements allowing for design or aesthetic review or approval, it could be within the development agreement because it's more of a contract. Or in this case, what was brought before us now in terms of providing for affordable housing, the option to either get those affordable units or some alternatives that would hopefully in the future get us the units, but not necessarily provided by the applicant such as the provision of land. So that zoning doesn't allow, doesn't consider or allow us to consider. So it can be separate from zoning requirements or to the extent that the governing body wants it to be or it could be tied directly with it. And the reason why we put that the attorney's office and planning thought it was prudent to put in the language that we're proposing is to set that authority in place that a development agreement is gonna hold to the standard zoning requirements but still has that ability if it is specified within the development agreement to vary those requirements. And final question, the language in the memo regarding large scale production, that's no longer relevant. It's not tethered to size anymore. It can be smaller, large. Yeah, they took the minimum sizing out and actually now I'm going on based on recollection. So maybe I'll be wrong. But I think even the 160D compilation of enabling legislations even took the large scale language out. But there's no, even today there's no minimum acreage requirement. Right, because my question is gonna be how big is big? What's my shoulder? Ross, would you consider it like, okay. Yeah, I mean, it could be on a two acre site but the square footage could be 200,000 square feet because it goes really tall, you know. Mike, thank you. Spot, thanks. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. Absolutely. I can't remember Jacobs. I mean, sorry, commissioner Jacobs, go right ahead. Thank you. Thank you. So I have a few follow up questions and I really appreciate all the work that you all have put into this, looking at this as another tool for us. What would we adopt for the city and the county be the same? Is that, would that be the goal to have something consistent across the city and the county? The text amendment that would move forward would apply, would not be a city only text amendment at this point, as the city and the county. So it would be completely unified. Okay. Okay, so obviously again, Brian, making sure that Brian is included. And could you give us examples of, I mean, kind of following up with what council member Middleton was, I think getting at is, I kind of wonder too, like what, can you give us examples of where we've seen development agreements, I guess since maybe you say Chapel Hill has this authority, where they've been used and what are some of the things that have been made possible with them that wouldn't have been otherwise? I've kind of seen a run of the gamut of how extensive development agreements have been used. Chapel Hill has established a process that is actually a natural, it's a zoning district, it's development agreement dash one. So if you want to go to that zoning district, you're doing ostensibly a development agreement and that sets the rules there. Raleigh actually, when I inquired about Raleigh, they haven't done development agreements and they're interested to see how it goes in Durham when I talk to that planner there. But we talked to High Point specifically, because one, they did a model, well, they didn't do a model, they've done two development agreements and the format of how they, the way their development agreement looked was very appealing to Durham. theirs was for a mixed use development around their stadium downtown and it involved the provision of utilities, the timing of that, who was gonna be responsible for that, it gave traffic impact analysis and other certain things. And so it's very, there was another one I looked at for a small town that had, it was for a single family subdivision and it included a host of design criteria for that single family subdivision for the actual houses. So it runs the gamut of providing just infrastructure improvements to what I talked about, the waiving of or different types of requirements that would be required per the developer, the amount of square footage, the density and even the building or architectural design. Okay, I think it would be really, it'd be great when you bring this back maybe, it sounds like you've already been kind of doing best practices and looking around at what other people have done. I think that would be helpful if you could share some of that insight with us. So I get the idea that you are looking at people that have been doing and then synthesizing what you think would be best for us. Sure, and in the memo, I actually linked three different development agreements. So you can take a look at those right now and pull them up and see what's going on. Right, but it would just be great to hear your thoughts on that. And is this something to, and again, we don't get much come before us anymore. But I know that there's always been the issue of proffers when there are rezonings. Is this something that would possibly give, for instance, the city council, more authority related to those type of situations that now you kind of, with rezonings and development plans, you can't really do. Is this meant to try to address that? Yes, it can. And Don, I don't know if you wanted to jump in on that. Yeah, I mean, I contrast a development agreement with our development plan rezoning and development plan rezoning is done pursuant to a city charter provision that actually includes restrictions on it. And so I would agree with what Mike said that a development agreement includes a lot more flexibility in that it's a negotiated agreement between the developer and the governing body. And one thing, there was a question about size. There is no partial size limitation anymore, but negotiating and drafting a development agreement is a pretty time consuming and probably expensive process. So I don't think you'd have this on an individual lot or something like that. It's probably gonna, I think you would only use probably on a relatively large scale development. Chair Jenkins, if I might add. Yes. Go ahead. One additional item, as Michael said, we certainly will, you've got access to those three and we can get you more examples. One of the things I have not seen this used for at least broadly is affordable housing. I do want to emphasize that I think it's really got a lot of unrecognized potential and really could be used effectively for that. Our affordable housing density bonus program is certainly very well intentioned and is, but it is very stringent and it's very specific in terms of the number of units, the timing of when the units are delivered and those characteristics have made it unusable by the private development sector. And so I think this is a situation in the case that's gonna be before council, for example, is basically saying, we're gonna do everything we can with a nonprofit developer to get this developed as affordable housing, but if it doesn't, it'll revert to the city and essentially the city can use it essentially for land banking and an asset to develop affordable housing in the future. So that will come before council may can make the decision then, but I just wanted to give a more detailed example of where the economics of each site can be considered by the governing body and the most contribution that is feasible, economically feasible can be made. My experience, you all have heard this from me before is almost weekly I have developers come to me and say I wanna participate in affordable housing, it's a math problem. And so this is a way to short-circuit that and recognize that and really have the private sector participate particularly on these bigger projects. Great, well, thank you for all of that. And it sounds like this could be a really important tool that you've just raised Pat and it sounds like this could be a great tool for the city council members. So look forward to hearing more about this. Thank you, Chair Jacobs, Commissioner Reckhow, Gretthed. Just very fast. I just wanna say that when I attended the rail pollution conference in Vancouver last September it seems like eons ago. I learned a lot about what Vancouver has done with development agreements leading to quite a bit of affordable housing construction. I shared a link to that information with Pat and also my conference report when I got home. So again, that's why I was ready to hop on board because I think it has a lot of potential to give us a little more flexibility in working with future developments. Thank you. Great, anybody else want to comment on the development agreement agenda item? Any other questions for Michael or Don at this point? In that case, it's safe for me to say something now. And I will say this. First of all, the mayor pro tem had to jump off to another call and she apologizes for not having been able to speak on this item. I will just say that the first person in Durham I ever heard talk about a development agreement was Jillian Johnson. Shortly after we got elected in the city council and she was hopeful that we would eventually move in this direction, really, really excited to see this. I think it gives local governments the kind of flexibility that we need to look out for the best interests of our city and our residents, despite some of the limitations that we normally operate over. And I really appreciate Councilor Middleton's specific questions. I did not think of those aspects and just want to say, Mark Anthony, thank you so much for bringing that type of inquiry into here. I think those are important things to know. And as long as no one else has anything else to add, I will say that our conversation about agenda item number 10 development agreements is done except, is there an action required? I want to see here real quick. No, we have received the report. We have provided comment. And we look forward to seeing this move through the adoption process at the various elected boards hereafter. All right, no, if there's anything else, Pat, is there anything else you wanted to raise before we adjourn the meeting? Yeah, there's one and I apologize. I know we've already run long, but there was one very short item that I neglected to mention at the adjustments that we wanted to add, which is a very brief presentation on virtual public meetings for neighborhood meetings that precede our plan amendments and middles. Sarah, are you prepared to talk to that? Yeah, we could take just a couple of minutes. It was supplemental material that was emailed out to you all after the agenda went out. Without objection from any committee member, I'll go ahead and ask Sarah to start talking about this item. All right, so one of the things that our ordinance requires for certain types of applications is for the applicant to hold a neighborhood meeting. This is something that the applicant does all on their own and it's a prerequisite to submitting an application for those types of requests. And so obviously in this environment, folks have not been able to hold neighborhood meetings. We've gotten several requests for, hey, is there a way that I could make some virtual attempt in order to be able to keep my project moving forward? And we're appreciative of kind of the economic impacts of folks and being able to continue with their development proposals and seek their entitlements. So we've come up with a draft virtual neighborhood meeting guidelines that we wanted to run past you all and see if you had any concerns with. They basically allow folks to have a virtual meeting as long as there is also a call-in option. We're very concerned about equity and accessibility for folks and so they need to run their platform by us. We get to approve the platform and verify that there is a phone-in option. It requires them to make sure that everyone gets the materials in advance. It requires them to hold the meeting open for a full two hours, even if no one comes. So we don't get into a situation where someone says, well, I joined 15 minutes late because I had tech issues, but the meeting was over. It also requires them to have a dedicated tech support person that goes out in their notices of people need assistance, kind of joining meeting or logging in or calling in, that they have someone dedicated to that. And it also gives the planning director the ability to require later on in the process, but before it gets to like planning commission, for instance, an in-person meeting, if we feel like it's warranted, if we feel like they need to do additional outreach for the case. And so that is the proposal and what we would like to be able to roll out to folks as an opportunity to allow them to keep things moving. Of course, there's still public hearings at the end of the day and notice that goes out for those as well. But we figured that if we're having public hearings virtually, then it's fair to allow folks to have a virtual neighborhood meeting option as well. Thank you, Sarah. Could I make a request of staff right now? I just searched through my email and I cannot seem to find that particular email for some reason. If someone could post a link to this, to the proposal in the chat, that would be great. All right, let me work on that. And while you're doing that, actually, let me give you a second, Ellen, because Sarah's the person looking for the link, but she's also the person that would be answering your question, so I don't wanna. No, it's not a question, it's a comment. Okay, go right ahead, Ellen, go right ahead, please. Well, it came in on May 29th, actually did read it last night. And it's excellent. I wanna commend the staff. But I thought it's very thorough. I don't think you left, well, maybe you left something out, but I didn't see it. I actually would request that you send it to our clerk and maybe the city clerk for their reference because I think it could be helpful for some of our boards and commissions and other groups that wanna hold virtual meetings. All right, I apologize. It's taking me a little bit of time to navigate to where the file is online and link it. We'll certainly send that over to the County Clerk, Commissioner Reckow, thank you. Can you, in the end, can you tell me who's the person who sent the email? Susan Cole. Susan Cole. It may be quicker for me just to resend the email if that's all right. Sure, sounds great. I just have a quick follow-up to it. Just let me just real quick, Wendy, I'm gonna get back to you. I don't, the last email I have from Susan Cole in my inbox is from January 31st. So, I don't think that's it. Okay, Chair Jacobs, go right ahead. I just have a follow-up comment to the planning staff that the guidance that you all sent out about virtual meetings that we got from Susan originally was unbelievable. I mean, I know that Ellen shared it with our clerk. You know, we're all doing these virtual meetings now, every department, every organization, every, but nobody, nobody has put the time and the thought and the effort that you all put into that document that came out related to guidance for virtual meetings. I was blown away when I read that. So, I just wanna really applaud you all and it needs to get widely shared. I know we've had challenges with our own meetings. It is hard and I mean, I know our poor clerk has been struggling on her own to try to, you know, run our meetings and do the tech support at the same time and it is just, but just the thought and the detail that you all put into it and, you know, getting back to the whole question of access and equity and making sure that everybody is included and it's just, again, thank you all so much. Thank you. Really wanted to thank you for those words and I wanna give all credit to Sarah who's led those efforts. As you suggested, Chair Jacobs, there's legal issues, administrative issues and kind of technical issues. And I think that with Sarah's leadership that we've been able to tie those together. So thank you. Sarah, thank you, Pat. Sarah, thank you for recenting that email. I just looked at it. Everyone's email address and Sarah and Susan's original email was correct except mine. And she typed charlieresedermancy.gov, not charlie.resedermancy.gov. And so that's why I didn't see it. I guess that's good for me because otherwise I was being very slothful and inattentive but it just turns out that this time, although not in future times, this time it wasn't my fault. So if other folks have comments on this, that would be great because I'd like to read it now. So I guess I will ask someone to say something for the next two minutes while I take a look at this. Thanks. Mr. Chair, I'll buy you some time if you'll allow me to jump in here. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you so much. Always good to see you and appreciate the work, the incredible work you and the team do. Just a quick question about language access. Is the, we're having a conversation amongst my colleagues about the ability to provide language access notwithstanding the amount of notification on the spot. Is it cost prohibitive to be able to provide interpreter services particularly in Spanish on the spot? Is that why there's gotta be the notification? It is, I will say that it's not, the cost doesn't vary on the amount of notice that we give the interpreters. The issue is the interpreters being available during the time slot we need them. So we have had really good usage of interpretive services like for outreach team meetings. And we even just with the first virtual one that was held did manage to work out kind of virtual interpretation while the meeting was going on, which is unique and different. But we are including in all of our notices and our postings information about how to request those services. So hopefully we have not had anyone for a public meeting, take us up on it yet, but we are poised to do so if someone does. Right. And it's safe to some of those 48 hours or 48 business hours. Yeah. Got it. Okay, cool. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a follow-up question to Mark Anthony's on the language. So there is software platform that allows interpretation in real time for attendees, is that correct? So I'm not familiar with a software platform. We use a couple of different interpreter services of live human beings that do interpretation. There are platforms, I know, our interpreters, for instance, when they translate documents, they do have some software that does it mostly correct, but there's a lot of kind of nuances in language that they then have to go back and correct. So it's not 100%, but no, the interpreters that we use for meetings are live folks. And oh, I see, so they're live. And so, and anyone who came in not on the regular platform, but Collins to the meeting can hear the translation? If, so like today, we didn't get anyone that requested translation, but if we had, yes, basically what happens is the way it would work is they would be, they would be watching this through the link or be on the call. They would probably have to be muted and be on a separate call with the interpreter who was also watching and listening so that we don't hear two conversations at once, basically. Thank you. Okay, does anybody else have any questions or comments on this item before I say some things? Great, okay, so first of all, as to a matter of process, when we are gonna consider an adjustment to a meeting agenda like this, it would be great if staff could follow up with members to make sure that we received it. That would be great because this item wasn't on our regular agenda because it wasn't raised in adjustments and because we're at the very end of a long meeting, it put me in, and I'm still in an awkward position of having to apparently be asked to vote on this without having given it real consideration. I've tried to skim it the past three or four minutes. And so that's a real problem for me. I know it's just the way where we are right now and I just appreciate that if we're gonna do these kind of one-off additions to an amendment that staff follow up to make sure that that was received. That's all, I really appreciate what it took to get us here to this point and just ask for that one little bit more of grace if we have to do this in the future. Sure, apologies. It's okay. So just so that I know what we're talking about, this is only in a situation where a neighborhood meeting is required by the current UDO, is that correct? Yeah. Okay, and on the attachment to virtual neighborhood meeting guidelines under the purpose, it says that the procedure here is to be used times when in-person meetings are not permitted because of an emergency declaration or other circumstances. I would love to have a little bit more precision in that the last three words there. I think what you mean to say is during times when in-person meetings are not permitted because of an emergency declaration or are not permitted due to other circumstances. Okay, so I think right now it could be read to mean or other circumstances besides when in-person meetings are not permitted. I would love to tighten that up. The reason is I think we should only be taking this step when we cannot meet in person. I think that's the intent, that's not how it reads at least in this part and I wanna make sure that's clear to everybody. So just one gentle request there. So I don't wanna cut you off and I do apologize. What we have been doing is saying while there's a state of emergency, either a local state of emergency or a state of emergency through the governor's office and then there are certain legislative requirements that would apply and to deal with that, then you would be able to have a virtual community meeting. That's great. I'm sure that the nuts and bolts underneath like where the work actually happens and the requirements live, everything is watertight. This document attachment to I suspect is gonna be provided to developers who may need a virtual neighborhood meeting in the absence of the ability to meet in person. My gentle request is that that last sentence in the first paragraph be tightened up so that developers who read this document are absolutely clear that the only time they can have a virtual neighborhood meeting is when in-person meetings are not permitted. That's all I'm saying. We can also end the sentence right after emergency declaration and take off the last three words. I think that would get at what Brian is saying also. Other than that, I agree with everything that's been said already. I think this is, I mean, the alternative is that the process or projects where this is required is just stopped until they can have in-person meetings and I haven't heard anybody on the committee say that that is the right answer. So failing that, I think we have to have some process and I think this looks fine. So appreciate the staff work to develop this. Also appreciate the grace to make that one change this very minor, but the one thing that I was able to catch in my skimming that I would change about it if I could. And then I think just now that I'm done talking, if anybody else has anything they wanna say about that or about this or staff have anything wanted to add, this is the time to do that. Okay, great, in that case, let me go back to the thing, what am I looking at? Hold on. I think what we are asked to do here is just report and comments. That's all, just receive the report and comments, is that all? Yeah, by the idea of the director has authority to set the guidelines, but we need to run them through you all for any refinements. Great, okay, well that's helpful. For some reason, I thought we were gonna have to vote on it. So I apologize for having said that. Well, with no other comments or questions at this time, sounds like the director has the guidance he needs from us to move forward with these virtual neighborhood meeting guidelines. And thanks again to staff for bringing this forward. Thank you. All right, anything else need to come before the Joint City County Planning Committee during this meeting before we adjourn? Pat, anything from you before we go? No, other than to thank you and add my apologies for that item being late. It wasn't ready, quite ready for distribution and we will absolutely make every effort to avoid having late ads like that. But thank you all for giving that feedback since it is time-sensitive. Otherwise, that's all, thank you. Fantastic, before we adjourn just a bit more about how I conduct meetings, just wanna be clear to folks, you may sense a lighthearted theme in the way that I call on folks or recognize people. I hope you understand that it's not because I don't take this process as this work seriously, just trying to take myself less seriously if at all possible. And I think it can help things move forward a little bit in any event. I just wanted to make sure y'all understand that and say thank you to the committee members for giving me the opportunity to serve for the next year. Look forward to the work we'll do together. And with that, I will adjourn the meeting. Thanks everybody, have a great job. Take care everybody. Bye. Be safe.