 You may start at any time. Good afternoon, welcome to the October meeting of the Durham Planning Commission. The members of the Durham Planning Commission have been appointed by the city council and the county board of commissioners as an advisory board to the elected officials. You should know that the elected officials have the final vote on any issue before us tonight. Tonight's meeting is being held virtually using the Zoom virtual meeting platform. In this virtual meeting platform, public participants do not have any ability to talk or be seen on video by default. To maintain a meeting decorum and a discernible record of meeting, the chat function has been disabled. Speakers will be given the ability to speak at the appropriate time of the meeting. If you have pre-registered, your name will be called for you to make your comments, just like in an in-person public hearing. If you called in before the meeting started and staff was able to get your information, your name will also be called to speak at the appropriate time as normal. You may also call in during the meeting tonight by dialing 301-715-8592. If you call in during the meeting, you will need to wait until the particular public hearing you are interested in starts. After all of the pre-registered speakers have shared their comments, I will ask if there is anyone else wishing to speak. At that point, you will need to digitally raise your hand by pressing star nine on your phone. And when recognized, state your name and address and make your public comments. Finally, all motions are stated in the affirmative. So if a motion fails or ties, the recommendation is not favorable. Can we have the roll call? Sure, thank you, Chair Amandolia. Let me pull it up. Chair Amandolia. Here. Commissioner Baker. Here. Commissioner Busby. Here. Vice-Chair Cameron. Here. Commissioner Cutwright. Here. Commissioner Durkin. Here. Commissioner Harrod. Commissioner Harrod, we will get back to Commissioner Harrod. Commissioner Lowe. Oh, I see Commissioner Harrod. Commissioner Lowe. I see Commissioner Lowe. Commissioner MacGyver. Here. Commissioner Morgan. Here. Commissioner Cease. Here. Commissioner Carmen Williams. Here. And Commissioner Zuri Williams. Here. So I believe we are all here, except for Commissioner Lowe, unless we are, he is just not showing up. Did we have an email, did anybody get an email about? Okay. We did not get an email. Okay. He might show up later. All right. Very good. Thank you. Great. And we can revisit Commissioner Lowe later if he shows up or if we need to approve an absolute amount of information. Approve an absence. So next on our agenda is the approval of the minutes and consistency statements from our September 14th Planning Commission meeting. Is there any discussion on the minutes? If there is no discussion, now we take a motion at this time. I make a motion that we approve the minutes. So. Chair McMillan, I'm sorry, I couldn't get off mute. As we adjourned at 12.08 p.m. And I can tell you it was A.M. It's a good catch. Yes, it was definitely A.M. I might make a comment that, Chair, you were not listed as Vice Chair in the minutes either. So I would want to make that correction. I may move on to. As the adjustments are made. I'll second. Great. Moved by Commissioner Morgan, seconded by Commissioner Busby. May we have the roll call vote? Who are? Chair Amandolia. Yes. Commissioner Baker. Yes. Commissioner Busby. Yes. Vice Chair Cameron. Yes. Commissioner Cutwright. Yes. Commissioner Durkin. Yes. Commissioner Harrod. Yes. Commissioner Low is not here at the moment. Commissioner McGyver. Yes. Commissioner Morgan. Yes. Commissioner Cease. Yes. Commissioner Carmen Williams. Yes. And Commissioner Zarrie Williams. Yes. It passes 12 to zero. Thank you, Michael. We will make those adjustments. Great. Next on our agenda are any adjustments to the agenda. We have two adjustments I am already aware of. The first adjustment is an update on the redevelopment of Northgate Mall. This would become item C under new business. The second adjustment would be a discussion on our December planning commission retreat date. This would become item D on new business. So first, is there any discussion on adding item C, a discussion of the redevelopment of Northgate Mall to our new business? Sorry, what's B? I only have an A on new business. Yeah. If you look at the agenda was updated online. I believe item B is approving our 2022 meeting calendar. Oh yeah, I didn't do that. Thanks. Sure. There's no discussion on adding an update on Northgate Mall. I would take a motion to add that to the agenda at this time. So moved. Seconded. Moved by Commissioner Baker. Seconded by Commissioner Morgan. May we have the roll call vote? Sorry, I forgot I was on mute. And Mendolya. Yes. Baker. Yes. Busby. Yes. Cameron. Yes. Cut right. Yes. Birkin. Yes. Harris. Yes. No, it's not here. MacGyver. Yes. Morgan. Yes. Cease. Yes. Carmen Williams. Yes. And Zori Williams. Yes. It passes 12-0. Great. And with that, is there any discussion on adding item D? Discussion of our December planning commission retreat time. And if not, I would take a motion at this time. So moved. Birkin. Moved by Commissioner Baker. Seconded by Commissioner Herod. May we have the roll call vote? Mendolya. Yes. Baker. Yes. Busby. Yes. Cameron. Yes. Cut right. Yes. Birkin. Yeah. Herod. Yes. MacGyver. Yes. Morgan. Yes. Cease. Yes. Carmen Williams. Yes. And Zori Williams. Yes. Again, passes 12-0. Thank you, Michael. Are there any other proposed adjustments to tonight's meeting? Staff has none. We would like to note that before we begin our public hearings that all the required notifications have been performed and are on file for review. And staff would also like to note for the planning commission applicants and the general viewing public that presentations presented by the applicants tonight with graphics, those graphics will be considered committed elements unless somehow specified otherwise per the UDO requirements. This information was given to applicants before the meeting as a reminder. Thank you, Michael. We will move forward to our public hearings. Our first case for the evening is case Z20-00017, which is 518 Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. We will begin with the staff report. Thank you. Give me just one moment to pull that up. Can everyone see that? Yes. Great. Good evening. Danny Caltrow with the Planning Department. This is a request for zoning map changes Z20-00017 at 518 Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. It was received from Wendy Ramson of Culture Jewel Timbs PA for one parcel located at that address of 18 Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway, totaling 9.651 acres. The site is within the city's jurisdiction and in the suburban development tier. The applicant is proposing to change the zoning designation of the site from Commercial General with a Development Plan or CGD to Residential Suburban Multifamily with a Development Plan or RSMD for up to 173 apartment units. The future land use map or flume is designated as commercial. If the zoning is approved, staff recommends a change to the flume to designate the property as medium to high density residential. In the context map, it shows the site is, as is said, its own CGD. The adjacent zonings are industrial light to the east and across MLK Parkway to the south. Office institutional to the north and Commercial General with a Development Plan or CGD to the west. And aerial photography shows the site is wooded with a mix of hardwood and pine except for an existing access driveway on the eastern side of the site that is allowing for the multifamily development to the north to use that driveway. To the east are associated industrial zone commercial and light industrial manufacturing facilities. To the west is the adjacent American Devaka Trail and opposite MLK Junior Parkway to the south are light industrial zoned commercial self-storage facilities. Oh, excuse me. The existing conditions, as previously noted, you can see that the site is wooded. A small repairing of buffer in the northwest corner of the site as well. And the development plan indicates the building and parking envelopes, the maximum number of units as specified with 173. The project boundary buffers, tree coverage areas, required open space, and proposed impervious surfaces. Just did want to note one thing. There is an inset in the development plan that was provided that shows an alternative buffer in building a parking envelope. If the site plan for the neighboring properties to the east are approved, then that would allow for the buffer displacement to be shared across that property and with the proposed zoning property to reduce the or to increase the parking envelope and reduce the amount of buffer on that site on the eastern side. There are a few commitments on the development plan. Text commitments, the connection between departments and bicycle and pedestrian facilities, connection to the Greenway Trail, and also a new bus pullout and pad shelter along Fayetteville Road, adjacent to the site subject to determination of a go-triangle and go-durham-et-time site plan. Staff analyzed the proposed development for consistency with comp plan policies. And except for the future land use designation, staff determines that this request is consistent with 16 of the 17 community goals and objectives of the comp plan that were analyzed and all three of the retained policies from 2005 comp plan and other adopted policies, ordinances policies. Staff is available for any questions. Thank you, Danny. With that, we will open the public hearing. We have six individuals registered to speak tonight, all registered as proponents. I will read out all of those names and then we will give the applicant team a chance to present. Those that registered are Dan Jewel, Wendy Ramston, David Arthur, Elijah Moth, Mark Gallifanakis, and James Bradford. We will provide 10 minutes to each, the opponents and the proponents. If I did not list your name to speak, please go ahead and queue yourself up by pressing star nine on your phone and we will begin with the applicant presentation. And Dan, can you list out all of the members of your team so I know who will be speaking and who won't? I will. Thank you, Chair Emondola and members of the commission. I'm Dan Jewel, president of CJTPA. Thanks for allowing us to present this evening. And Wendy Ramston, James Bradford, who may be a little bit late and Mark Gallifanakis are here to answer questions. So they will not need time for presentation. I'll be doing the presentation and hopefully I can get it done in well less than 10 minutes. And if it's okay, I'll go ahead and proceed with that right now. Thank you for your time again. Danny, would you be able to bring up the slide that I sent you, the second one, most importantly, not the opening slide? Certainly, give me just one second. I'll have it done. We'll do that. And while you're doing that, I'll go ahead and fill the time a little bit. So Wendy Ramston, of course, is a landscape architect in our office. The project manager and our clients are James Bradford and Mark Gallifanakis, all here to answer questions. As Danny said, we are requesting a rezoning from the existing CGD to RSM. The CGD is in place because previously a place of worship, a church owned this property and they had every intention of building a church, but that did not happen. So we are requesting a zoning to RSM in order to do multi-family. Danny, could you go to that second slide? And we can just hang on that one. Perfect, thank you. This is the only slide I wanna show. And the reason for that is this, this is an interesting neighborhood. There's a lot of things going on here. There's, as Danny said, there's an existing multi-family development directly north. So we think this is a good addition to that, to the site. There's Industrial to the South, that's the UDI Industrial Park with lots of businesses down there, people doing manufacturing and startups and research and things of that nature. Some of the more prominent uses near the site, that big white box directly to the West across Fayetteville is the Lowe's and along with that, there's a few out parcels and that sort of thing. So you don't see any single family residential in this area until you get down to the Southwest off of Fayetteville and south of MLK. But I think what is important to think about on this site is the connectivity and more importantly the non-single car occupant connectivity that it provides. So at this location, we are directly adjacent to the American Tobacco Trail. The American Tobacco Trail forms the Western boundary of this property. And as Danny said, we have committed to making a physical connection to the American Tobacco Trail as part of this project. So a good bike-ped connection that way. Secondly, the Southern boundary is Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is a very well-provided street in terms of alternative transportation methods. There's a continuous sidewalk from this site all the way to the West to at least Hope Valley Road. There's also continuous striped bike lanes within the Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard cross section all the way to Hope Valley Road. And also just as importantly, that stretch of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and those bike lanes feed you directly into the Third Fort Creek Greenway. If you all are familiar with that Greenway Trail. So this is your opportunity if you're coming south from downtown to cut over to the Third Fort Creek Trail and get in there. We have committed to making those connections both to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and the American Tobacco Trail. And as Danny said, we will also work with GoDurham, GoTriangle and provide a bus shelter, a bus stop on Fayetteville. So our folks can use that. The blue lines that you see directly to the west of the site represent a good bus service on Fayetteville Street. There's another bus line that actually comes from the corner of Fayetteville and MLK and goes to the west. And that bus line gets you to a grocery store and the drug store about a mile down the road at South Roxborough intersection and the North-South Third Fort Creek Greenway Trail as I mentioned before. There's also a bus route on Cornwallis which would be diagonally just sort of to the northeast of the site, you can see that blue line. So a short walk either through that existing apartment community to the north or cutting over to industry line and getting north. So there are actually four different bus routes within a quarter mile walking distance which is what that green line represents of this site. So I think we've got for a site that seems suburban in nature, there's very good connectivity to non-vehicular public transportation. What I'd also like to point out is some of the proximity. So as you go south on Fayetteville, you're only a quarter mile from Sollite Park. There's a produce stand, there's a grocery store about two and a half miles down the road. Again, there's a bus route down there. There's dental, medical, daycare. We're one mile from Southwest Elementary School and only a half mile from Pearson Town Elementary School. So very close and I would say very walkable with some parents holding hands of kids going in that nature. If you go north of Fayetteville, of course, Hillside High School is just a mile up the road. W.G. Pearson Elementary is just a little over a mile up the road. Again, we have public transportation going in that direction. There's a food line up there and you're only three miles south of NC Central which provides another opportunity. And also just as for information that Danny, if you can hover over that just to the northwest of the site that wooded area on the other side of Cornwallis sort of in the upper right quadrant of the page, that's where the new Catholic High School is going to go. So they have already had a site plan approved for a new high school for the diocese. And then there are other churches, daycares, food and all kinds of opportunities within the site. So for a site, again, as I said, that seems generally suburban in nature. I think we've got some good walkable things within that quarter mile walk zone. We have some schools that are slightly farther away from that and we have excellent transit service and probably the best bike-ped facilities or some of the best in the city of Durham that are adjacent to and within a short walk of the site. So I hope you'll agree that for a modest size multi-family proposal, I know you know most of the ones that come before you are at least 225 or more units. This is only 173 Macs that this would provide a good opportunity for some housing for folks in proximity to all of these things and that you would hopefully recommend to the council that you would agree with that. So that concludes my presentation, our presentation and we are all here to answer any questions that you might have. So thank you for your attention. Thank you, Dan. With that, we'll move to the proponents. We have two proponents who are not a part of the applicant team. The first is David Arthur who I believe is here with us and the second is Elijah Moff who I do not see listed but Elijah, if you're here by phone, please press star nine to virtually raise your hand. And with that, David Arthur, you have a couple of minutes to provide any thoughts you would like to add. All right, can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Yeah, so my name is David Arthur. I am one of the co-chairs of the Board of Trustees at New Creation United Methodist Church. We're in the process of selling this property being considered today. And we just wanted to express our support for the rezoning request. I'll just mention two primary reasons right now. For one thing, the sale of this property would facilitate our mission of serving Durham and the wider community by giving us the financial freedom of paying off the mortgage for our building on Old Chapel Hill Road. Second, we are hopeful that the proposed development on this property would help to ease the shortage, meet the need for good, moderately priced housing options in Durham. We thank you for your time and for your consideration of this request. Thank you. And Elijah Moore, or Elijah Moff, I wanna make sure you get a chance to speak if you're on the call. Please raise your hand if you are. And if anyone else would like to speak on this case who did not register, please raise your hand this time. Again, that's star nine if you're on the phone. Seeing no one else, at this time I will close the public hearing and open it up for comments from commission members. Commissioner Durkin. We were kind of talking about this before and it raises a question for me of how we treat the responses listed in the community goals and objectives. So this, I guess my first question is really for staff on what we should be doing there. It will lead into a question for the applicant. There are a few places in the community goals and objectives that they describe providing workforce housing, but that's not at all in the application of the commitment. So I'm not really sure how to weigh that in my analysis of this case. Can staff speak to that? Yes, this is Danny Kulture. I think that was, we evaluated that based on the fact that there was no price points listed for the apartments. So we don't know for sure that it's being committed that it is truly workforce housing. Okay. I'm a little concerned about the, I like that the community goals and objectives are in here, but I'm concerned that the language is presented in a few places, whether it's workforce housing or providing dog park or something that's not on the face of the development plan as a specific commitment is a little misleading because they're not obligated to provide it, but it is in the staff report. So I don't know how to deal with that. And I guess it's something we need to just talk about as a commission and with staff on this one, but also if you're thinking about all of them. So I'm raising that, but I guess I'll just shoot over to the applicant and ask them what they're thinking on price point and what they mean by workforce housing and why are they not committing to it as a committed element? Dan, if you want to take that one, or somebody else on your team. And now I'm unmuted. So I can answer your question. So thank you. That's a great question, commissioner Durgan. And we have been talking about this at length in the design team, because we did put that out there in our community goals and objectives. So first and foremost, this is a community that's not going to be targeted toward the high end luxury housing that you see being built over or Durham all over the place. That's not what this is. Similarly, it is not a community that's going to be going for low income tax credit financing. So we're going to be in between the two. In terms of a commitment on what that price point is and what workforce housing actually means, we can't commit to a price point just yet because the market is so volatile in terms of lumber prices and fuel prices and that sort of thing. So we have no idea what it's going to take to build this a year, a year and a half from now, assuming that we get approval from the city council and site plan approval. But what I will tell you is that it's our intent to sort of hit that middle market, but it's also very much our intent to have that conversation with the city council members because we know that they as much as you will want to know what that really means and we'll want us to make some sort of a commitment to making sure that this is a place that more than just the business as usual market rate housing rents will house. So in a long roundabout answer, we're figuring that out and we will have that conversation with council because we know they will not want to move forward on this project until we do figure that out. Well, I want you to have a conversation with community development before you even get to council so that you have a plan to present to council because I think that they could work with you to figure out something that's not 60% of AMI but you could do 80 maybe and fit this into something within the UDO and have a commitment that works on the face of the plan. I'm concerned about developers and I don't mean that you would do this in that face but describe what your intention is and we all approve a project that we are excited about and want to see happen and that it's more luxury housing and that's not what we approved. So I'm a little concerned about the way that these are just intentions and not commitments and I honestly don't know how to deal with that. So I'm curious what other commissioners think about that for me now, thank you. Thank you, commissioner Durkin, commissioner Busby. Thank you, chair Amandalia and I guess first commissioner Durkin I hear your concern and I don't know exactly what to do with that either. I hope that Dan and his team understand it sounds like he does the importance of this and so I do hope that there are some additional conversations that can be had before this moves forward to council so that we have the best ideas on the table. I'm more comfortable with this development team as a team we've worked with a lot in Durham and that I think has brought us other affordable housing proposals. So I feel pretty comfortable with this particular team and their ability to move it forward but I hope Dan, I hope you hear and can take advantage of some of those feedback that commissioner Durkin just offered. I had a couple of questions Dan for you and the development team I think to start. And the first was, I know it was mentioned in the staff report, it was mentioned in your update I got dropped for a couple of minutes and so I had to then jump back on. So if you already covered this, I apologize for asking but I just wanted to hear more about the access points. This is a little odd. We don't see this kind of if this then that or if not that then something different. So do you mind just kind of talking us through the access points and how the traffic will work? And then I'm also just curious is the road the road that would be the main road is currently a private road. Is that up to standards and is that gonna be able to handle the traffic flow? All good questions. Danny, would you be able to bring up the development plan by chance? And I can explain. And commissioner Busby, I hear you loud and clear about working some of these things out before we get to the council and you and commissioner Durkin. So thank you. So Danny, if there's a way to bring up the development plan I can talk us through this and that's, yeah, that's perfect. Okay. So this is a complicated one and is a complicated one for a couple of reasons. One, even though there's an existing driveway on this property that runs along that eastern property line for the benefit of the multifamily community to the north we do not have access to the northern end of that road. So we do not have the legal ability to go out to Cornwall this road on that but we can use it for our access. What we are proposing to do which is why there's an either or is this. So if because we're more than 90 units we need two points of access. We can certainly get two points of access on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. The challenge with those though, as you know if you've been out there those would be both right in right out only. And I have a speaking suspicion a bunch of people would like to go east on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. So if you look up in the extreme northeast corner of the site you'll see another access arrow there. So one of the development team is actually purchased that parcel that has an industrial building on it that abuts industry lane and connects to our property. So it is our intention to build a driveway from that access point down to industry lane and that would be built to a 24 foot wide private street standard, something like that which would then allow folks to get on industry lane and either go down to Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard where you have a full movement opportunity or up to Cornwallis where you have a full movement opportunity. But because that property, Jason property that one of the development team bought is not part of the rezoning. Staff cannot, that entrance cannot be, access cannot be approved as part of the rezoning but can be approved at the time of site plan approval which I think is what that note is on there. So it's very convoluted. We have all confidence and expectation that it will be approved and we think the access will be there at the southeast corner on the existing driveway and the northeast corner on the new driveway that goes out to industry lane. So that's a long convoluted description of a convoluted access problem. So hopefully that adds a little bit of clarity to it. No, it does. And thank you for taking the time to explain it and I think it's good just to walk through it because it's a little different. And then, so it makes sense though. I hope you're able to make that happen at the site plan to be able to connect to industry drive or industry lane. Even then, if you go out to industry lane and you're making a left turn on the MLK that's still gonna be tricky. Any thoughts on that? Or is it, I mean, I don't see any other improvements or anything that are proposed here. It is tricky both on MLK and Cornwallis at Rush Hour. I know, because I've tried to do it many, many times. So I think partially it'll be a learned behavior. And I think it's just gonna be what it is. Obviously, if you need to go to the, during Rush Hour, if you need to go east, you would go up to Cornwallis and head east that way. And if you get down to Alston Avenue then the two sort of connect and you can get where you need to go. So it's not the best situation but we think it's much better than a right in, right out, only from the site. So thanks for thinking about that. Yeah, and I agree. I think the connection to Cornwallis, people will figure out their workarounds depending on the time of day. I know I do that already in my neighborhood. And then the only other question I had is, do you mind sharing the plan for the wetlands? And so when I look at the development plan, it looks like the northern section of the wetlands will be a tree save area. But then am I correct that the two-thirds southern section just appear to be potentially part of the development footprint? So I'm just kind of wondering what your thought is without asking for any kind of committed element on the development plan. Right, right, right. So the potential wetlands mean that when our biologists went out there and looked at the wetlands, it was last year when we had an amazing amount of rain and every square foot of land in Durham probably could have passed as a jurisdictional wetland because of the amount of water out there. So our biologists will go back out there again and see if it is still a wetland and if not. But if it is, it is our intention to seek a permit through the Army Corps of Engineers to fill that small little bit of wetland area. That's well under the threshold that you can do is what's called a nationwide permit. There would certainly have to be mitigation of some kind, but if it is in fact a wetland, we would pursue a permit with Corps of Engineers to fill that small amount. Okay, and I think my final question I've asked this of other proponents recently and many have been able to do it is we're seeing increased rain flow. We're seeing way more flooding. So as we're filling in a lot of these smaller, urban, suburban nooks that are undeveloped, we are seeing higher rainfall events and more flooding. Would you be able to be able to do something like a 100 year stormwater or some sort of commitment that would strengthen the amount of ability to capture the rain flow coming off this property on the neighboring properties above and beyond the minimum that's required? I don't think I could commit to that just yet, but certainly if that was a recommendation that you passed along to the council, then we would be thoughtful of that between now and then. Okay, well, thanks for considering it. And I'll put it in my comments. That is all, Chair Amandolia, thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Busby. Before moving to Commissioner Carmen Williams, I did want to briefly recognize Mark Gallifan Anakis, who has raised their hand. I wanted to give you a couple of minutes. I think you would raise your hand earlier and I think you might have wanted to add something about the affordable housing conversation. That's correct. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Okay, I'm Mark Gallifanakis. I'm one of the members of the development team. And I just wanted to follow up and hopefully try to address Commissioner Durkin's concerns about affordability. Effectively, if you guys can see, or if Danny can pull up the development plan which shares building footprints. So the idea is we're controlling ourselves as far as keeping this from being a high-end, high-rent apartment community by design, intentionally not having high-end amenities. So there's no plan to do a clubhouse which would have house amenities like maybe a dog wash area or yoga room or a meeting room or a game room. There's no car wash facility. It's really designed to be truly housing and good quality new housing. And we're just leaving off all the amenities and all the creature comforts that you find in almost every single new development, whether that's downtown or out on Highway 54. So what we're doing is we're essentially putting a throttle control on ourselves. And if we don't have those amenities, if we can't provide those amenities, we're not gonna be top of the market. We're not gonna be competing with those properties. And that's by design. So you won't see the only non-residential structure on the property be a very, very small office for onsite management and onsite maintenance. And that's it. The amenities really are the location being mid-market pricing for rents and connectivity to public transportation and American tobacco trail. Those are the amenities there. It's really what's already there. We're not gonna pile those on. We're not talking about quartz countertops or marble or anything like that. Just good quality, new workforce housing. I think that's the definition of workforce housing. It's somewhere between what everybody else is building right now, which is very high-end and tax credit subsidized, affordable housing that is usually funded through the North Carolina Housing and Finance Agency sometimes with the help of Durham Community Development. And we're happy to talk to Durham Community Development. We know them and we've worked on other projects which they're considering right now. Thank you, Mark. Commencement chair Durkin, would you like to add anything since this was in response to your comments? Sure. So I hear what you're saying, but there's nothing on your application that commits you to any of that. And I don't think I agree with your definition of workforce housing. And I want to be clear that I was talking about the Durham Community Development Department, the city department, not DCLT. I'm not in opposition to this project. I think it's a good location for an apartment building or rental apartment building. However, I'm really concerned with the illusion that you're providing something that you're not obligated to provide. So I will be putting a lot of comments or efficiently worded comments into my response to the city council, but I do think that this needs to be flushed out more. And if you're, if any applicant is saying something in response to the community goals and objections that alludes to promising or providing something, then that needs to be a committed element. Thank you. Thank you, commissioner Durkin. But that will turn to commissioner Carmen Williams. Thank you very much, chair. I'm a no lid. My first thought as far as this is concerned is I'm against this project and I'm against this project because it doesn't make sense in this area. Before I heard about the issue of putting in an application of filling in wetlands even partially, I was against it. That definitely does not sit well with me because we have a very sensitive culture that's already not being protected in any way, shape or form. And I believe that this particular parcel at some point in time may be developed. I hope that it's not because connecting to industry lane dumps out on Cornwallis Road, which is a two lane road that's heavily traveled already for people trying to bypass to get to Highway 55, to bypass to get to Cornwallis, to get to RTP, which is already heavily traveled. And the other end of industry lane dumps out on Faleville Road, which is closer to the other end, closest to Barbie Road, where there's already been lane improvements. And there's just not enough commitments on here outside of affordable housing or workforce housing, entry and access points. Maybe you will be able to get access in case it gets to site plan and it gets approved. It's a hardship. And if I'm not mistaken, the median aspect of MLK runs all the way from Faleville Street all the way down to I believe University Drive, there's a median, which also makes this not make sense, regardless of the access to industry lane. And I live in this area and it's a nightmare. It is a nightmare driving eight o'clock in the morning, 12 o'clock in the afternoon. I think the only time it probably makes sense is about three o'clock in the morning. So this development does not make sense here. If I could, I would put a moratorium on all rezoning requests for residential until we have filled all the housing we've already rezoned and approved to see if we still have a deficit at that point because this area is grossly oversaturated. I don't hear much as far as community engagement that was done. It is a commercial area. However, there will be impacts of residents in this area. It's just, it's tough. And it's tough because the road improvements that were done on Faleville Road to handle prior to this development if it were to take place, we're not including this development being put there. So, and now Faleville Road will have a median where it's not a free left turn in any direction from MLK all the way up to Riddle Road, which is heavily stressed. So I think that this just needs a better place, though I do want the church to be able to pay off their mortgage and serve the community of Durham. I just don't think that it should be done at the expense of others. And with the lack of, I guess, commitments or development or what ifs and maybes, it just seems that there's a lot up in the air right now that's not really set that makes this a formidable project in this particular area. And there will be quite a few schools that are impacted in this area. And then they're going to build another high school in this area, which is gonna be even more traffic on a more regular basis that just does not make good sense in an area that's already overly saturated on a daily basis. Five o'clock MLK being two lanes in both directions is already fully saturated from Faleville Road all the way down to 751. And that's tough. That's really hard. And this is gonna create a masterful impact even though you're not building to what you could be and you're not gonna be luxury apartments. I just don't think that this does not make good sense in this area and the impacts on it will reach far beyond what you could possibly consider even as a developer but as a resident of Durham, I don't agree with this development at all and especially with the turnouts and the turn-ins, I wouldn't wanna live there and the only way I could possibly get home is a right turn-in and a right turn-out because you literally cannot turn across traffic on MLK and you definitely wouldn't wanna try to make that turn-in and hold up traffic on Faleville. So those are my comments. Thank you, Commissioner Williams. Next I recognize Commissioner Cease. Yes, thank you. I will try to follow on in part, Commissioner Williams, the observations she shared about this area here but first I have a question for the applicant and the reference to the connection to industry lane that is not part of the rezoning but would show up as part of site plan presumably. The distance as mentioned is 20 feet, I believe in the development plan and you mentioned a driveway connection but would that also have a sidewalk? There is a sidewalk on industry for all the references to the connectivity and access. I'm just intrigued and curious as to whether that would also apply to industry with what's proposed or what will be proposed at the site plan stage. If the question is, would there be a sidewalk on that new connection we are building to industry lane? The answer is yes, there would be. Okay, great. Well, I appreciate to the overview, Dan, that you gave of the context and the number of destinations that are accessible within a half a mile. I mean, it's purely a mapping or a quarter mile, half a mile, a mile, you may reference to the school sites as well. You know, there's a mapping of distance and that certainly is key to creating a place where residents there would not be dependent upon an automobile to access these destinations. But I think it's important to note not necessarily in the context of this project but in the context of the comprehensive planning work that is being done and the policy working groups that have been established, both the infrastructure working group and the transportation infrastructure group, that this site in many ways could exist in many locations across the city in our suburban areas. And Commissioner Williams, to your point, it's saturated and to the degree that it's saturated, if you will, I believe it's saturated with uses that have been very much dependent upon the automobile and as the means of access, although a lot of these apartments to the east of this site do have good service to the bus routes, for instance, that are located along East Cornwallis. And certainly, you know, it's a prime location in terms of direct access to the American Devaco Trail. So in my mind, this is really a place that is ripe for kind of transforming the way in which infill sites, in this case, a suburban infill site, not an urban infill site are built in a manner that is more consistent with the goals and objectives that are laid out in the comprehensive plan. And that is multiple modes of travel, lots of different types of destinations, accessible nearby. But I have to say that this site is, as Commissioner Williams noted, a place with a lot of traffic. And it's a place with a lot of traffic and a place with a lot of roadways that are designed for cars, not for people, not withstanding the American Devaco Trail, not withstanding the sidewalks that do exist. The dimensions of the travel lanes are just excessive. They're suburban, they're high-speed environments. And so there are gonna be conflicts that arise over time between these types of places as we transition or as the attempt is made to provide for wider access and mobility for people who may not choose or may not be able to afford or may not have easy access to a car, people who need to get around on foot or on bike. And I'm mentioning this for this project because again, of where we are with the comprehensive plan. And I think we need to be really careful in coordinating from a policy perspective, the land use decisions and projects that come to the purview of the Planning Commission and the Planning Department and have that both closely linked with and help inform the actions that public works and transportation take as certain standards apply and hopefully evolve. So those are the comments that I wanted to share. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Sees. Commissioner Cutbrite. Thank you, Chairman Mordola. This to me is an interesting project. I think what strikes me is I listened to Commissioner Williams and Commissioner Sees as well as Commissioner Durkin's comments is where we're frequently put in these situations where we've got some choices to make about sort of what's ideal and what's important and how we proceed on some of these projects or not. And so my thought is 170 or so units of residential to the extent that we could have sort of true workforce housing here and Commissioner Durkin can probably set me straight on this, which I think is between 80 and 120% AMI. So you've got a wide range there. So from a financial commitment standpoint, there's probably some room to say, yep, I think we can do that, notwithstanding the administrative burden associated with actually being committed to that, right? There's some costs associated with that. So understanding that, I think that that may be an opportunity to commit to some of the workforce housing opportunities. If we could accomplish something like that, my sense is as we start thinking about sort of what's important and what's not, is if we can create additional workforce housing, then what we're sacrificing, at least in this particular site, is it sounds like some traffic inconveniences. And for that, I would say it makes sense to establish some workforce housing. I think the same sacrifice has to be thought about or considered, particularly as it relates to the environmental aspects and what may or may not be filled in on the wetland. Again, all of these things are choices that we have to make here. And as we do that, I think it's really just sort of what the people want. And we're in dire need of housing, workforce housing. And so if we can get that and deal with traffic, then so be it, as a growing city, any major city has traffic, you can't avoid that. I think there are some ideal options. This would never be a walkable area. It is what it is. It's already done and baked in. And so providing some affordable or workforce housing here, I think is the way to go. Those are my comments. I support this project for the reasons of getting additional workforce housing into Durham, recognizing that when I do that, I am not in line with, or I recognize that this will cause some traffic increases and potentially some small environmental issues. That's those are my comments. Thank you, commissioner cut, right? Before returning to commissioner Carmen Williams, I want to open the floor for anyone who has not had a chance to speak yet on this case. Commissioner Baker. Yeah, thank you. I'll be brief. I think it's been pointed out already that this is an extremely challenging area that's very built out in a completely auto-centric manner. And I think that we're learning the lessons of the challenges that presents to us in terms of safety and getting around and accessibility and equity and sustainability. So we have to deal with this reality. It's what we're working with here. Under the circumstances, I, in general, I think that townhomes, sympathizing with colleagues and others, townhomes are reasonable, I think, use in this location. I'm looking through and appreciating this document, attachment six, demonstrating comprehensive plan consistency using the community goals and objectives. I believe this is a document that is sort of temporary as the comprehensive plan gets more formalized and we actually start incorporating these into our regulations rather than sort of trying to rely on the goodwill of developers. But I will say that I'm sort of leaning on these. I'm leaning on these heavily because the community has spoken about what the goals and objectives are. There are these check boxes, where and how does this proposal meet the intent of various objectives that are listed here and there are options demonstrated as a commitment, demonstrated as a process or other innovation. And other innovation tends to be the check box in a lot of these. And it's an interesting word, innovation in this context in this year. So I have not seen enough personally to be convinced that this is consistent with the goals and policies of the comprehensive plan. And that's what I'm basing my decision off of. We've seen a few developers recently who have made very strong efforts to come into conformance and consistency with the comprehensive plan, the goals and objectives of the community. I am not convinced that this has done that, that this has reached that, even though I do think that this isn't a reasonable use. I think it's actually a good use. Maybe not ideal, but the context is not ideal. But just based on the many, many goals and objectives that we have just recently adopted. And I think, Mr. Mercier pointed out, we have, I think it's important to be careful because there was the before the new comprehensive plan and then there's the after the new comprehensive plan. And do we want there to be a difference between what we see before and after the comprehensive plan? And I think we do. I think that we want something that's different. So that's what I'm basing my thinking off of and my decision off of. I'm still listening to what all the commissioners have to say, but I'm leaning toward following the comprehensive plan and I don't see the consistency between this and the comprehensive plan at this point. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Baker. Commissioner Carmen Williams. Thank you very much, Chair Emondoya. I promise I will be extremely brief. I know that we're trying to do a lot in terms of building housing that is on bus routes and has walkability and we're trying to address these issues, but there's only so much we can control and the bus routes in Durham have not increased. The bus timing has not increased. We don't know when it will increase. So providing more bus access doesn't necessarily mean or building in an area where there's more bus access does not necessarily mean that we will create a pattern in which when we build, people will want to take the bus or alternate methods of transportation. With that being said, yes, traffic has increased because we have built and everyone pretty much that we have built for has brought a car so that they can drive to the places that they want to go in order to get groceries and to do different things because we do not have enough commercial locations within the walkability that makes certain things, I guess, convenient for walkability and for exercise. Most people ride their bikes on a tobacco trail, but it's not to commute to work, it's for exercise. It is not for quality of life. It is literally just them being able to get out and to do different things. The sidewalks are there in case they want to walk but at the end of the day, they still get in their cars and they drive to work because we have not resolved that need. So creating more of an impact where yes, the bus lines are there, I think that we should do a better job if at all possible beyond traffic impact analysis, polling people to see who are actually biking, how many people are actually driving cars, how many people that live in this area are looking for workforce housing and there's no commitment by this developer for workforce housing based off the comments for Commissioner Durkin and the various definitions in terms of what that looks like. So with that being the case, also based off what Commissioner Baker said and Commissioner Seese, it is extremely important that we move forward with the utmost intent and certainty with what we continue to allow and the things that we are willing to sacrifice today will cost us. It may not be within the next 10 to 15 years, but within the next 20 to 30 years, these will be very expensive investments that no comprehensive plan can adjust or address. So I think that it is imperative that we continue to move forward with the greatest intent possible because we have more of a conservation representation that we have to present for a lot of people, but not just for people, for the environment. And that should be our greatest consideration. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Williams. I do not see anyone else who has their hand raised at this time. I would just say, first off, I wanted to kind of echo some of the commentary on the new element of our packets we received. I thought having these community goals and objectives in our packet was really exciting for me. I was very happy to start using these and getting to see how they work. I think there's gonna be a lot of conversations about how they work and how to use this moving forward. But some of the things that I appreciate about using these is the way certain goals and objectives are framed. For example, we're now looking at developments with a lens for accessibility for elderly folks and for disabled individuals from the get-go, not as an afterthought. And I would encourage applicants to recognize that as they fill these answers out in the future to make sure it's not just, oh, yes, we will make sure it's accessible, but how are you incorporating different experiences within the way you are setting up your development? I think there's a lot of language in here about equity, inclusion and justice. And that is a sometimes abstract thing to present within our land use patterns. However, I think one way that we can do so is by being intentionally inclusive. And when I say that, what I refer to here is with affordable housing. By leaving housing prices to the market, we are leaving ourselves to be inherently exclusive based off of traditional patterns of development that have promoted certain groups over others. And so I would encourage applicants to look at that and be more intentional with incorporating affordable housing as they move forward. That's one way that we can move forward these goals. And I do want to say I share the same concerns with the language of other innovation as Commissioner Baker. It feels like what that really is saying is you don't. And we're trying to use a better connotation to say that this cap again or this development is not gonna meet this goal. So maybe that's just something we understand and recognize as we look at these moving forward. Maybe others have different thoughts on how that phrase is being used. But it's notable and it caught my attention pretty immediately. Overall, I agree with a lot of the comments that have been said on this case, especially from Commissioners Baker, Williams, and Durkin. I'll say I live in this area. I love living here. I can run to this site, which is incredible, but I wouldn't cross-fade though. Fade was kind of like the outer boundary of my run. And then I make my way back south. And with regards to connectivity here, it is unfortunate that the commercial site adjacent to this property is a Lowe's and not a grocery store. I know we can't necessarily change that in this moment, but I'm not sure how frequently people will cross-fade though for Lowe's advanced auto parts. And I do think it is always notable to me and worth recognizing that this is the well-connected part of Durham and this is not what development looks like throughout. It always, as much as I love living here, it always strikes me how many sidewalks are here compared to Lowe's and parts of Durham. Yeah, and those are all the comments I have at this time. I think as of now, I am meaning no on this case, but others have comments that could sway me that could change. Commissioner Cease, I'd like to recognize you now. Yeah, thank you. Your reflections on this packet with the five categories as responses to the goals and objectives. I wanted to say this before I forget it. It strikes me that the observations you and Commissioner Baker made about this category of other innovation that I believe there really needs to be another box that can be checked there because there is a confusion created by the box that says does not apply because there are certainly cases where a goal and objective may not apply, that the aspirations that are identified may not be relevant to a particular site, but there also are projects that come forward in which they simply do not comply and do not comply with the goals of the objectives is very different than it not applying. And I think that needs to be differentiated in the staff packets or in the packets that we receive in terms of describing these projects going forward. I wanted to say that before I forget it. Thank you, Commissioner Cease. Would anybody else like to speak? Yes, I believe I would. You are recognized, Commissioner Herrod. Thank you very much, Commissioner Alameda. I appreciate all the comments that have been made and a lot of them very truthful. The staff did say, you know, 16 out of the 17 goals and objectives were met, and I do agree that it's pretty subjective in a lot of cases. I hope that as we move forward, as Commissioner Baker said, they get to be a little more definitive so we can make better judgments, but I do think, you know, we're making a judgment call here, obviously, and I do think that the bus lines and the sidewalks and the attempt to try to make this site more accessible to go in different directions is important. And now, and also the workforce type housing, I frankly don't know what that means, and I hope it'll be clarified at some point. Maybe that's just my inability to understand, but I've been favorite of the project, primarily for those reasons, accessibility, and somebody going to the grocery store could get on the bus and go two miles to the grocery store and back, so I tend to be in favor of this for those reasons. It's not ideal, but I think it's a lot better than some other developments that we have passed in that regard. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Herrod. I'm Commissioner Morgan. Thank you, Chair. I guess a couple of things that kind of come to my mind. I wanted to follow on Commissioner Ceasar's comments. I know we're just trying to work through this goals and objectives that are on the staff report. I might make a suggestion if there's an other category, maybe we specify what that other means, maybe sort of a blank where that could be put into the staff report so that we'd have an idea of what kind of innovation is there, especially when I'm looking at some of the applicability. And so I'm always open for some improvement. That was sort of one suggestion. I think the other thing that kind of comes to my mind is I know we're aspirational about some of these different applicants. I do kind of like the idea that this could possibly transform that area. And I know that it's been built for automobile access and certainly the road structures around it can be difficult for it, but also maybe to try to change it is putting in something like this that infills into the area and could be transformative, especially the access to the tobacco road and other areas. And I know I understand the concerns about traffic and what would it add, but if there are certain attributes and I know we're missing some of it, but it does sound like the applicant is interested in doing some of those things to make it change than what we normally would see, it could, again, what would they be able to build by right? What would they be able to put in place? So I kind of like the ideas behind it and I like the location of where it is to transit. So given in other areas where you don't have transit, that can be rather challenging. So just my two cents here and just wanted to pass that along. Thank you, Commissioner Busby. Thanks, Chairman Mandolia. I was just gonna also just weigh in on my vote. And so I started early with my questions and comments. I'm actually gonna vote to support the project. Commissioner Cutwright, I agree with you. I've been thinking about the trade-offs. And so I hope as this moves forward to council, the council will ask and I'm gonna write in my notes and I know many of you will questions, particularly about the affordability and any commitments that can be made as well as dealing with stormwater runoff, maybe some of the traffic issues, but the real trade-off is this is a good place for this kind of development. I hope it gets stronger, but the big trade-off is is it here or is it gonna continue to be out in Southeast Durham or some of the other green space areas that we've been voting no on? And we're gonna have to figure out these infill projects. There are a lot of upsides, even though I hear all the concerns from my commissioners who may vote no, I just wanted to share why I'm planning to vote yes. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Busby. Would anyone else like to speak? And I will just say before I take a motion, as this case is presented to us currently, I will be voting no. I am voting no with the hope that there is a deeper look at the way this project can contribute to affordable housing, to any commitments to affordable housing. On this case, I mean, that would be reflected in my comments to city council. And at this time, I would take a motion. Chair, I would like to make a motion. I'd like to make motion that we send Z2 quadruple 017. Let's see, I'm just looking at the address here. Sorry about that. Anyways, this 518, Martin Luther King Jr. drive forward to the city council for a favorable recommendation. Second. Moved by Commissioner Morgan, and seconded by Vice Chair Cameron. May we have the roll call vote? Absolutely, thank you. Chair Amondola. No. Commissioner Baker. No. Commissioner Busby. Yes. Vice Chair Cameron. No. Commissioner Cutwright. Yes. Commissioner Durkin. Yeah. Commissioner Harrod. Commissioner Harrod. Sorry. It's okay. Yes. Yes, okay. Commissioner Low is still not here. Commissioner McGyver. No. Commissioner Morgan. Yes. Commissioner Cease. Yes. Commissioner Carmen Williams. No. And Commissioner Zuri Williams. Yes. Yes, so we have one, two. It passes seven to five. Thank you, Michael. With that, we'll move on to our next agenda item. This is Case Z21 Quadruple Zero Three, 2211 Page Road, and we will begin with the staff report. Great, good evening. Thank you, Chair Amondola and Vice Chair Cameron, Honorable Commissioners. I am Alexander Kay with the Planning Department. I'm presenting on Case Z21 Quadruple Zero Three. This is for 2211 Page Road. Planning did receive a rezoning application from Warren Mitchell and David Durham, private landowners for about 10 acres of land. This is located at 2211 Page Road in the suburban tier. The existing site is zoned residential rural and the applicant is proposing to rezone to office and institutional with a development plan. The existing future land use map designates this area as office. The staff is not recommending a change to the future land use map designation based on the zoning. There is no zoning overlay for this area. And this proposal is being proposed to allow for the construction of up to 67 townhouse units. So the existing zoning, as I said, is residential rural and the applicant is proposing an office and institutional with a development plan zoning district. You can see the site is surrounded by a residential suburban multifamily, industrial light and residential suburban eight. Quite a variation and mix of different zoning types that above the property. If we look at the aerial map, we can see that the site is pretty heavily treat and is surrounded by the city of Durham water tower. It is also surrounded by office and built out warehousing. Maruga's manufacturing site is to the north. There's undeveloped land to the east, mostly undeveloped land to the south, except for two single family residences that do exist. And then the Brassfield office park to the west of the site. This is a list of the summary of commitments that are actually in excess of the ordinance requirements. This project does limit the use to townhouses in this office and institutional zoning district. They're also proffering interconnected parking and common areas for pedestrians, traffic calming features, site access drives, crosswalks, off-road trails, the dedication of right-of-way for road winding and bicycle lanes, and construction of a three lane segment of Page Road and the potential construction of a bus shelter and pads, which is subject to go Durham and go triangle specifications. There are no graphic commitments in excess of the ordinance for this project. And there is a mix of building facade materials committed to design commitments. You can see the site is heavily treated with a pinewood hardwood mix. There's a city of Durham water easement along the north and western boundary of the site. And then the northern portion of the site is heavily encumbered by a perennial stream. The Page Road extension will run along the western portion of the site. And the existing zoning of residential rural for this site would currently allow for the construction of up to 11 single family homes, if built out. The applicant is proposing office and institutional development plan but limiting the uses to townhouse units. So this would be up to 67 townhouse units on the site. The applicant is also proposing a condition of 22.41% tree coverage on a requirement of 20% for the site. It is also committing to 26.75% open space on a requirement of 18%. The neighborhood meeting was held in accordance with the UDO requirements on December 29th. No participants logged in or participated in this meeting and staff did not receive any social pinpoint comments on the interactive land use site. Staff has determined that this request is consistent with 21 of the 24 community goals and objectives of the comprehensive plan analyzed as this is a residential use. More of the community goals and objectives applied to this project than would say the previous case. All three of the three retained policies from the 2005 comprehensive plan are consistent and other adopted ordinances, plans and policies. Staff is available for questions and the applicant is on the call tonight and is available to answer questions as well. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Cahill. We have three participants registered to speak tonight. Those are Warren Mitchell, Zach Shipman and Nicole Messenger. We will begin with the applicant presentation. I have Warren Mitchell as the only member of the applicant team present. Warren, you may begin your presentation and if any other members of your team right here, please state their name as well. Yes, thank you. Zach is the engineer, Zach Shipman and he's available for comments as well, but I'll be giving the only presentation. I wonder, Alex, could you put up the aerial while I speak? That's a good image with the aerial photography view because I do not have a PowerPoint. Good evening, members of the Durham Planning Commission. I'm Warren Mitchell and I live at 104 Amberwood Run in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Some of you may remember when I brought an application to rezone this property, the light industrial, in March of 2020, it was your last in-person meeting before the pandemic. Staff was not in favor of the project and the Planning Commission voted unanimously to deny the rezoning. After that meeting, we did not pursue the rezoning and we withdrew the application. So there were three reasons why the staff and the Planning Commission did not support that proposal for the light industrial zoning. First was we did not have a deep plan. Our application was just for text-only zoning. The second was the staff did not support a change to the future land use map from office to industrial. And to quote staff from their report, staff does not support the request to change a future land use designation and is determined that the current office designation is more consistent and compatible with adjacent land uses, end quote. So as the future land use map was the second reason and the third reason was just the zoning itself. Staff did not believe that our light industrial zoning was a good fit to the adjacent residential zoning to the east and I guess to the south as well. So we decided to change the plan and that's why we're here tonight which is an application for 67 pound homes. Our application includes the deep plan and it addresses the zoning and future land use compatibility concerns by staff and the Planning Commission. Recently, the town of Chapel Hill commissioned a report by Rob Stevens of Business Street and that report revealed that the town is severely lacking of housing inventory and the reason I bring this up to you, there's a following quote is given as a primary reason for the housing shortage and I think this applies to Durham as well. Among the top culprits is the lack of under occupied multifamily product he said which often makes up the most affordable housing for home buyers, end quote. So the existing zoning on this property is rural residential. We all agree it's not a rural here any longer and the 11 homes that could be here, single family, we have proposed 67 ownership opportunities. Unlike the first proposal in 2020 for light industrial, town homes do belong on this parcel and are compatible with all the other residential neighborhoods in the area. We had no neighbors opposed the project and no one showed up your neighborhood meeting and we hope you will agree that this is the right use for this property. Last but certainly not least, on behalf of the development team tonight, we would like to make a profit to Durham because towards helping to create affordable housing, tonight we're offering a one-time contribution to dedicate the dedicated housing fund in the amount of $16,750 which will be made prior to site plan approval. And this amount comes out to be $250 times 67 town home units. This concludes the presentation. Thank you for allowing me to present this project and thank you for your service to Durham. Thank you, Mr. Mitchell. Next, we will turn to any individuals who would like to speak on this case either as proponents or opponents. We had one individual who is not a part of the applicant team register for the meeting. Their name is Nicole Messenger and I do not see Nicole and the participants list unless they are on the call or on a phone. And if they are, please press star nine to virtually raise your hand if you would like to speak. And if anyone else would like to speak, please raise your hand. Again, that's star nine if you're on your phone. Seeing no one, I will move to close the public hearing and open it up for comments from planning commission members. Commissioner Busby. Thanks, Chair Mandalia. And to the applicant, I appreciate that you have, you know, you pulled back the initial proposal. We thought what might make sense. I think coming in with residential makes a lot more sense to me than the initial proposal, especially given the need for housing here in Durham and what's happening in this rounding areas. You know, my only question, and this may be, I think it's more, I guess it is for the proponent. In on page two of the report that we received from staff, it's on the two under the policy analysis comprehensive plan consistency. There's a lot of information here, but in particular, the final sentence says, there appears to be nothing on the development plan that validates the statement of varied mix of architectural styles as well as flexibility with unit type, building height, affordability, intergenerational design, or meeting housing for all income levels. And I wanted to just hear your thoughts on that and any ways that you might address that statement. Well, on the architectural styles, I'm not the builder of the homes and we want to just retain the flexibility for that. All right, are you talking about, would you repeat the second part of that question? Yeah, I'm just reading from the staff report and the statement just stood out to me that flexibility with unit type, building height, affordability, intergenerational design, or meeting housing needs for all income levels. So there's a lot of information there. I just wanted to get your take on that because that's what was in the staff report and I want to hear your thoughts on that. Well, just regarding the value of the home price for this neighborhood, this is not a, the neighborhood is not a really wealthy or it doesn't have a lot of expensive homes. And I think that due to that, if you look at the surrounding projects, these will be on the more affordable side of the town homes that are being built today. And it's a smaller project. So obviously there's no extra amenities as was mentioned in the last application, but it's going to be available to any buyers that want to live close to the research triangle, the airport and this part of Durham, which is there's definitely a shortage around this area. Okay, thank you. And that was my only other question. I'll just state to the commissioners that, like I said, I think this is moving in the right direction. I appreciate, I think the residential makes a lot more sense. I am on the fence and I want to hear from all of you because the lack of specificity, even though there is a development plan that is good, the lack of specificity does raise some concerns for me. So I look forward to hearing this conversation. Thank you. Thank you, commissioner Busby, commissioner Baker. Thank you, chair. I just want to share some initial thoughts and then listen to the conversation as it evolves. First of all, one thing that sticks out to me is that the rezoning request is soft and institutional and the request is for town homes. And I think that is just one of many illustrations of how badly we need a new unified development ordinance to rewrite our UDO. I would, what stuck out to commissioner Busby also stuck out to me and I want to commend Alexander for his analysis. We don't always see this and sometimes it feels a little bit like staff is going to bat a little bit too much for particular cases. And I felt like this is a staff report that had really good balance and had some true analysis and some true discussion and kind of laid things out there honestly for us. And so I want to commend Alexander for that. One issue I want to bring up here is that the site is currently very low density. As the applicant pointed out, rural residential. It's obviously no longer rural. It's not going to be rural in future. And so what that means is that this is a huge opportunity because we have leverage. It's also not in the city right now. And the request is to bring it into the city. We don't have the annexation case before us but there will be an annexation case that we'll have to go forward with this application. And so there is leverage there and that's really important to consider. Sometimes we don't have very much leverage and we don't have a lot to work with. That's not the case here. This is also a relatively small parcel on the edge and really on the frontier of a very large, developable area. And I think that's another really important thing to consider is that this is going to set a precedent. And this is a very large area. It could be a really great, walkable, mixed use, coordinated, developable area with multiple developers, multiple landowners. Or it could just simply be kind of like the old stuff that we see, one pot of townhomes here, one pot of multifamily over here, commercial on the corner, completely out of oriented. So there's a broad range of what could happen here. And so I think it's important that we sort of step back and think about what goes here. And one thing to add to that, that it is on the edge of this much larger area, developable area, is the importance of connectivity and connecting through the site to the rest of the area. Right now, all I'm seeing is a connection, is one connection from the West, actually I don't have it in front of you, one connection from the West and one future connection to the East. And there are a lot more opportunities. We need a lot more connections for future development. Otherwise everyone's, it's going to be cul-de-sac, it's going to be cul-de-sac hell and people are going to have trouble getting around. I don't see any committed connections to the South. And I think that there are opportunities for multiple, three or four. And those are very real things that we could see come out of the site. And that's all I wanted to say right now. I don't want to lean in any direction at this point. I want to hear the rest of the conversation, but those are important points I wanted to make. Thanks. Thank you, Commissioner Baker. Commissioner Durkin. Thank you. I also had a question on the two goals and objectives down from the one that Commissioner Busby pointed out. There's a line that says that the development of this area as a town home project, as opposed to other housing types, promotes quality construction and equitable price points for the area. And I'm curious what the applicant meant by equitable price points. Well, I think that what I was referring to was what's in and around this property. You know, there's a lot of multifamily and high density projects in Durham. And they're near walkable, they're near downtown, but there still needs to be home ownership opportunities. There's not enough. And the 67 on this smaller partial delivers that. And so these are not going to be the most expensive town homes in Durham. I'm not a builder. My business is boat and RV storage. And that's what we had in mind here in addition to some flex buildings. But when we saw that's not what the staff and the planning commission wanted, that's when we shifted to something that was compatible with the residential uses around it. And I would like to mention connectivity to the south. They have a site plan already for those two middle parcels and they have not presented any opportunity to connect. Otherwise, we would be glad to try that, but so they're kind of closing the door on that due to the distinct development of those parcels to the south. Have you reached out to them about it? No, I just saw, I asked Alex for the plan and it's like a warehouse, not something they didn't, it's actually sits up because of the retaining wall along our property. And I just don't think a warehouse and town homes would be suitable connection when our connectivity, I mean, maybe a pedestrian connection is really what we need to be talking about versus vehicle connections. And I'm more than happy to entertain pedestrian connections. Okay, going back to the sales prices, what's your proposed sales price now? What is your underwriting show at this point? Well, again, I'm not a builder. So I'm guessing they'll be in the low threes is just what I know about the market. But I'm not a town home builder and that's my best guess. Yeah, the staff report has a proposed sales price of 305, but I was curious if that number has been updated or when that number was set forth. It was proposed before this increase in lumber, but my friends and connections in the building business say that lumber has actually come down a little bit since the big increase. Yeah, I'm just curious because in the staff report, it shows that the sales prices for the area have in that zip code specifically have increased by 25%. So your proposed sales price is not 25% less than what is being shown now. So I'm just kind of curious like how affordable or equitable these prices are. Again, I don't, for this one, I'm less concerned about the illusion of providing housing, affordable housing or workforce housing that in these responses than I was the prior one. I think because you have them that they don't apply. I'm a little again concerned about the goals and objectives, the responses and the goals and objectives making it seem like applicants to providing something that they're not sort of written as like a response to a grant application than what they're developing. And would Commissioner Busby, I think it would be better than the prior application for the site and then intending on supporting it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Cutwright. Thank you, Chair Amondola. Just Commissioner Durkin, I think that they were just backing into the costs, just the, I think they just did the 21 million divided by the 67. So like building costs, sort of all the building costs of this as opposed to the purchase price of the town homes. It's how I'm reading that, just it for what it's worth. That's not what the tax process is. It's just proposed sales price, sorry to interrupt you. I was just looking at average unit costs, it's 305. Okay. I guess what, just listening to Commissioner Baker, I think one thing that we should really, that we have to consider here and also hearing the proposed plans for the warehouse to the site is that as you think about potential uses for any site around Durham, the developers, they're gonna want, first of all, the lowest hanging fruit is gonna be sort of what gets done. If we want something more robust and more comprehensive in nature, I think that we should really consider incentivizing developers to do just that. Right now there isn't any incentive for a developer to sort of go above and beyond and think outside the box. And so to the extent that we can figure out how to get that done, I think we'll start to see some more creative and projects and potential collaborations between developers. And a part of it, I think is just general resources, right? If we had unlimited resources an ideal situation would say, all right, we've got these two sites here, what's an ideal use and can we find somewhere else for the warehouse to go and create a mixed use community here? Those are the types of things in work that has to be done. And it's not, I don't think it's as simple as we'd like it to be but I hear you and I agree with your position on you're creating sort of more robust development but I think the incentives need to be there for that to happen and that they're not in place today. Thank you, Commissioner Cutte, right? Mr. Cahill, I'd like to recognize you briefly. I see you have raised your hand. Yeah, I just want to make sure we have full context on the valuation per Commissioner Durkin's kind of question, line of questioning, make sure that's fully answered. This has an associated annexation petition when they file that annexation petition, they have to provide a number of units at full buildout and what that total valuation would be. So the number they offered was the 21 million and that's where the 21 divided by 67 comes from. And while I'm not in the business, I would like to just say that when you mentioned the 305 it occurred to me and I heard average price, I think the increase in value that you mentioned the 25%, it would probably mean that the 305 may be the entry point or the low end instead of the average. So that's just a commentary on the value, but which actually is what I can tell that's still lower end for around Durham, certainly in certain parts of it like Durham. Thank you. Commissioner Morgan, you are recognized. Thank you, Chair. Couple of things that come to my mind, I kind of live in that area obviously in the Southeast Durham coming into it, I go through that area. It seems like there's gonna be a lot of work going on, especially with Route 70 becoming a freeway. There's the right of way with Northern Durham Parkway connecting to Route 70 and then Aviation Parkway coming up through Wake County in there. And it looks like that site to the east would be absolutely right for some type of multi-use development. And I'm concerned a little bit that this might cut it off as far as access into that land area that was 40 acres that are in Durham. And I'm not sure how many acres are further into Wake County, but that would be a great place for some type of multi-use or even development of a neighborhood type of facility. So I don't know, I'm kind of on the fence in this one as well, only because I do think that the plan is a lot better and there is opportunity, but it would be great to see sort of more of a vision of what's gonna happen in this area. I mean, if we're building warehouses to the south and then this area, it seems like we're going back to some patchwork. And I think I do agree with Commissioner Baker's comment that this area could actually be developed a lot better or more comprehensively if we could see the bigger picture as to what's going on. I know where we have to look at it at this point as an application, but I would like to see more context of how this would fit into the overall plan. Thank you, Commissioner Morgan, but any other commissioners who have not had a chance to speak to this point like to speak? Yes, sir. Chair. Commissioner Herrod, you are recognized. A concern I have is intermittent and perennial streams and we're also crossing it with utilities and a road apparently. So I was just curious if you have any comment about how you would deal with that. I know there are some requirements in the UDO about certain setbacks and all that, which you showed here. And we've asked this in the past, would you be willing to consider going over and beyond the requirements, minimal requirements on that? Well, actually I'm glad you raised that question because it gives me a chance to explain what's happening at that crossing. That is not a stream there. It looks like one, but it's actually a linear wetland. It's not a stream, this is no stream buffer, but what we're doing is there will be townhomes on the left side and then we're just the road access. And we are not disturbing that entire linear feature. So it'd be just a driveway access across with the pipe and then townhomes on the right side. So it will be limited, the wetland disturbance, unlike the last one that wanted to actually disturb all of it, we are just discerning enough for the road. Okay, that would be my only question at this point. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Herod. Would any other commissioners like to speak at this time? I will just make a brief comment. If we look at the draft place type map that we received from or that the planning department has developed, this site just falls just outside of the Southeast focus area that was studied and is immediately across from a area that was originally drafted as 15 minute neighborhood. It seems like this area on both sides of Highway 70 is ripe for a more mixed use development. And I like Commissioner Baker have concerns for how we start development in this area. I would also love to see kind of more fleshed out on the affordable housing side or any potential affordable housing component or just the price points on that front. I do have a couple of questions. I'll go to the applicant first. And I first want to ask about the choice of land use designation. Commissioner Baker alluded to this earlier, but I'm curious why you've gone the route of office institutional instead of a residential use. Yeah, that's a good question. So staff in the previous application said they did not support a land use change and the future land use is office. And that required us to go with an O and I zoning to comply with the future land use plan. I didn't want to do match with the concerns I heard at the last zoning. Thank you. And so I'd like to follow up with Mr. Cahill. Can you speak to the choice to have this be an office institutional land use rather than a residential? And in particular, if you could highlight anything that makes a requirement or not a requirement by having it be a non-residential land use. That's a great question. And it's something that staff talked about quite a bit before coming to planning commission and agenda. I think commissioner Baker kind of alluded to this, the way the UDO is written, townhouses are in a loud use inside the office and institutional zoning district. As such, this is a compliant project and a compliant use in terms of staff's perspective on what would be the most appropriate buildout of this site. Of course, there's always a range of potentialities that would be most ideal, but we do believe that townhouses are an appropriate transition in an interconnected project for the site and its location versus what an industrial or office would have been. And does that difference in land use designation, does that have any implications on building code standards? So the international building code standards will still apply to townhouses as they would in an office and institutional just as they would any other residential district. Great, thank you. And then I have one more question for Mr. Cahill. In the staff report, we have the median sales price for the city of Durham. My assumption is that it's all for sale units and that is not filtered out for town homes. Can you provide context there? Is that the median sale price for town homes or is that inclusive of other unit types? Yeah, thank you for asking that question, Chair Mendolia. So staff started including this section because we heard feedback that there was context needed for housing prices, both rental and for sales. The data that is available is relatively limited. And so what we're pulling from is Redfin data, which does not filter out rental units for sale units. We're working with what's at our hand. Additionally, it doesn't filter out for townhouses versus single family. We can pull a little bit of data on it, but it becomes less accurate the more we filter it down at that point. So this provides more of a general context. We do include, make sure we include a disclaimer as well in there that these are not for sale prices. These are not committed prices on the development plan or are they able to commit to them? And so just want to be clear about that. While we use these numbers to show context and comparisons, there's nothing that says that this is what the number has to be. Thank you. So as it stands, I am looked at on this site. I do see the perspective that this could stand as a good transition into what will hopefully become a mixed use development. It's hard because in many ways, we would be making that decision on blind faith that that is how this land would develop in the future, which is why I'm not sure I'm welcome to vote at this time voting yes, but if any other commissioners would like to speak at this time, I would welcome you to do so. Otherwise I would accept a motion. Do I have a million if I may? Yes. Thank you. I move approval of case number Z21 quadruple zero three to send forward to the city council with a favorable recommendation. Seconded. Moved by commissioner Buzzfeed and seconded by commissioner Morgan. Maybe have the roll call vote. Yes, thank you. Emondolia. No. Baker. No. Busby. No. Cameron. Yes. Cut right. Yes. Thurkin. Yeah. Harrod. Yes. McGyver. No. Morgan. No. Cease. Yes. Carmen Williams. No. And Zuri Williams. No. The emotion fails five seven. Thank you, Michael. And thank you to the applicant. I did want to give the applicant one more chance to speak. I see they have their hand raised. Wanted to make sure you, if you had any questions, we could address those. Yes. Well, right before the vote, you were talking about the office land use. So when staff at the last hearing talked about wanting, you know, thinking that office was the right land use for this location, there aren't any offices in this area. It's a flex space and residential. So I thought, well, that's not the right use. And then when the pandemic came, there's a lot of offices that are going back and being sublet, they're going back on the market. So clearly that wouldn't be the right use when staff said their concern with the blast application was residential next door. I thought providing 67 opportunities for home ownership was a good idea. I heard your concerns and providing connectivity to the project, to the east. Thank you, Mr. Mitchell. Yeah, you got it. Appreciate it. Yeah, the public hearing is over to me to move on to our next case. But if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to staff. And I'm sure that will come up in our comments to city council. With that, we are going to take a pause. Right now it's, we're at the two hour mark and we've been asked to take breaks every two hours to give our closed captioning staff a break. And so it is 730 now and we will return at 740 PM. Thank you. All depending on each other to reduce the spread symptoms and inconveniences of COVID-19. Take time to really look at the numbers. That's what really convinced me to get my shot is seeing just how effective this vaccine is. Viruses need a place to live. And the more people have their vaccine, the less places viruses can live. And as we prepare for a return to an in-person semester in the fall, I wanted to be sure to protect our campus community so we're able to get back to all the fun events that we enjoy and that we miss. It's important for everyone to take those shots because this is the only way that we can make sure that we keep everyone safe on campus. Now each of us has a chance to protect ourselves and others from the spread of COVID-19. When we face a problem, we want to use the best tool in our toolbox and the COVID-19 vaccine is our best tool. If you have a spot, take your shot. If you have a spot, take your shot. If you have a spot, take your shot. Everyone from teens to seniors can get a COVID-19 vaccine. Visit myspot.nc.gov. Have you experienced changes in Durham that negatively affect your everyday life? Many in the community have. The City and County of Durham want to correct those issues and ensure that future changes work for the entire community. They're listening and want to hear your ideas for making Durham a place where everyone thrives. That's why the City and County of Durham are inviting all members of the Durham community to take part in the creation of the new comprehensive plan, which will determine the vision for growing Durham over the next 30 years. This collaboration between the City and County of Durham and the Durham community is the result of the New Engaged Durham Initiative, which seeks to ensure that all community stakeholders are involved in the shaping of City and County projects. Don't build a Durham that works for everyone. Every year, 7,911 calls are made in North Carolina. 9-1-1, would you like to speak? Will you answer the call? Every second counts. You can be that lifeline. People in crisis look to us for assistance. We provide guidance and support until physical help can arrive at the scene. Join us and make a difference in our community. Be the calm in the chaos. Be the voice in the dark. It's the hardest career you'll ever love. Will you answer the call? Discover more at it.nc.gov slash 9-1-1 careers. See a pothole? There's an app for that. Missed pickup? There's an app for that. Need to set up water service? There's an app for that too. Introducing the OneCall app. Report your service request online on your schedule. Just download for free from the app store or Google Play Store. Then sign up and start using it to report problems, check the status of your service request, or just find out more information. Try to do a OneCall app today. Paint does not belong in our creeks and rivers. To avoid paint pollution, remove paint from brushes before you wash them and wash brushes indoors. Never dispose of paint in streets or yard drains. It's not just bad for the environment. It's also illegal. Remember that paint thinner and oil-based paints are considered hazardous materials and cannot be put in the trash. By taking a few simple steps, you can do your part to preserve the health and natural beauty of our creeks, streams, and lakes. Let's all work together to keep our waterways clean and paint free. For more information, please visit durhamnc.gov slash stormwater. We really are worried that this delta variant is gonna find everyone who's not protected. The fact that this is more infectious, causing worse outcomes, and spreading like wildfire in the United States, I don't believe this is a wait-and-see period. It's a time to really roll those sleeves up and get those shots. There are more people dying this week than there was last week. Our rates of hospitalizations are going up. The people that are losing their lives are the people that are unvaccinated. And the good news we know is that the vaccines we have effective against this variant and against preventing serious infections in those who do get the delta variant. These vaccines are safe, they are effective, and they're necessary for us to try to get back to normal. Look, you're rolling the dice, you're playing roulette with this, and the longer and longer you wait, the more and more likely that you are to get this and suffer really severe consequences from it. Everyone from teens to seniors can get a COVID-19 vaccine. Visit myspot.nc.gov. The Durham City Council meetings and Planning Commission meetings are now available live stream on all devices via the City of Durham social media accounts. To watch, simply go to City of Durham NC on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. Devices include phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, streaming boxes and sticks, and smart TVs. The easiest way to view the live stream on smart TVs and streaming devices, such as the Roku, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV is via the YouTube app. Now you can follow along with the latest developments in the Durham community at dinner, your kid's game, the mall, in bed, during a breather, in the bathtub, and even on the International Space Station. Hi everyone, we're returning from our recess. If commissioners can turn their video on so we can make sure we have a corn before continuing. And also as a reminder, please leave your video on unless you're having some kind of video trouble. If you're able to like to have all the commissioners with their video on, I'm waiting for a couple more to turn their videos back on. That we will turn to our final public hearing of the evening. This is case Z21 Quadruple 09 NC 55 and Hopson. I know we will begin with the staff report. Thank you very much. Can everybody see the screen? Yes. Thank you. Dandy culture again with the planning department. This is a request for zoning map change. Z21 00009 at NC 55 and Hopson as received from Joel Scannell of Scannell Properties, LLC. Four parcels located at 6622, 6652, 66. It dropped out. There it goes. Sorry. 6652 and 6572 South Austin and also 6501 NC 55 highway, totaling 105.17 acres. The site is within the county's jurisdiction, the suburban development here in the Falls, Newst, Jordan Lake protected area watershed up late or FJB. There is an associated annexation case, BDG 21005 submitted concurrently with this application. The applicant proposes to change the zoning designation of the site from residential rural RR and commercial neighborhood CN to industrial light IL to allow for a range of uses allowed in the zoning district. A site plan D21 00230 has been submitted for this area and additional IL zone parcels. However, the plan only calls for site grading and development of street and public utility infrastructure and no proposed use has been identified yet. The future land use map or flume is designated as very low density residential and industrial. If the zoning is approved, staff recommends a change to the flume to designate the property as industrial. In the context map, it shows two areas that are included in the zoning designation. One is an RR to the left, the large area and the other is smaller on CN. And the adjacent zones for large trackers on RR land to the west and RR core land to the north, IL land to the east and residential zone land within Chatham County in the light blue and Wake County in the line green to the south. Also just for reference, although not adjacent to the land in this request, there's area denoted, you can see in the pink that is under carries jurisdiction. The small parcel on NC 55 is split zone CN and RR is adjacent to the Honorary School to the north under the same zoning designation, vacant science research park land to the east into the green and developed IL zone property to the south and vacant IL zone property to the west. The aerial map research revealed that the large track was previously timbered between 2010 and 2013. That was research we did with the aerials. This current aerial photo shows larger tract is vegetated with mostly young pine trees and under store herbaceous vegetation. The smaller is a preserved large tree vegetation along the perimeter of the site. A duke pyre easement projects from east to west through the northern tip of the tracks. The smaller parcel is fully vegetated with a mixture of pine and hardwood. And there is a boundary map that has been submitted with this and it identifies the three parcels in the larger track and the one single parcel and that is also being requested for this rezoning. Staff looked at the comprehensive plan and policies and except for the future land use designation determined that was consistent with 7 and 11 goals and objectives and all three of the retained policies from the 2005 comprehensive plan and other adopted ordinances and policies. And staffs available for questions. Thank you, Mr. Coltrane. And by that we will open the public hearing. We have six people registered for tonight's meeting on this case. One is a proponent for our opponents and one did not list. Patrick Biker is on the applicant team and we also have Lee Weaver, Lisa Orgren, Sarah Slickman, Michael Pollock and Elizabeth Weaver who are signed up for this case. And we will begin with the applicant team. Patrick Biker, you have 10 minutes and when you begin please say any other members of your team who are present. Thank you. Can you hear us okay? Yes. Okay. Mr. Coltrane, would you please bring up the PowerPoint that we sent over for this agenda item please? Do you wanna see that? Yes, thank you, Danny, appreciate it. Good evening, Chairman Amandolia, Vice Chair Cameron, members of the Planning Commission. My name is Patrick Biker. I live at 2614 Stewart Drive. I'm an attorney with Morningstar Law Group in Durham and I'm here tonight representing Scannel properties for this zoning map change. With me tonight are Kelsey Westwood of Kimley Horn, our site engineer, along with Andy Smith who is leading this project for Scannel properties. Next slide please. This rezoning is to rezone four tracks to IL without a development plan. One of those tracks is on the east side of Highway NC 55 and then three tracks are slightly more than 2,000 feet to the west of Highway 55 along the Wake and Chatham County lines. Next slide please. For over five decades, this entire assemblage was the former property of Triangle Brick where Triangle Brick excavated clay to manufacture the millions of bricks used throughout Durham and the Triangle region. Next slide please. This zoning map change application covers approximately 100 acres on the west side of NC 55 along the Wake and Chatham County lines as I mentioned. And then there is approximately a four acre parcel on the east side of Highway 55. Next slide please. I need to stress that the entirety of the industrial park that Scannel properties hopes to develop contains 235 acres. And the 135 acres next to the west side of NC 55 are already zoned straight IL industrial light with no development plan. Next slide please. Here's the aerial photo of what this assemblage looks like. You can see the former brick kits within the 135 acres on the right. And on the left side is the 100 acres that is an area that has been timbered at least twice over the past several decades. Next slide please. To the north of this 235 acre assemblage is almost entirely US Army core land highlighted in green before you. Next slide please, Danny. Except along Highway 55 where this assemblage is adjacent to the Triangle wastewater treatment plant. It's the sewer plant that serves Research Triangle Park and Southeastern Durham County. Next slide please. The residential neighborhood to the north is about 120 feet from the Triangle wastewater treatment plant property line. Next slide please. And then the nearest homes are about 700 feet from the wastewater treatment plant itself. Next slide please. In regards to this zoning map change, the closest home is over 500 feet away from the boundary of this rezoning. Next slide please. And then it is important to note that there is a 200 foot wide Duke energy easement that precludes any buildings within that easement area. And that is more than 1000 feet from the nearest residents to the north. Next slide please. Next slide please, Danny. To the south in Carey's jurisdiction, there's another industrial park proposed which is shown on this slide. As you can see, it contains 14 acres zoned appropriately under the town of Carey's jurisdiction. The site plan is currently under review. I believe it's on its second round of reviews. It's to allow for 170,000 square feet of flex, office, R&D and manufacturing space. And it's anticipated to be open for business in September of 2022. The remainder of the property to the south along the Wake County and Chatham County lines in Wake and Chatham counties are remnant parcels that are still owned by Triangle Brick. I now wish to address why there is no development plan with this zoning map change for industrial life. As I mentioned earlier, all of the properties to the north is either US Army core land or the Triangle Waste Order Treatment Plan. To the south is this industrial park in Carey and the remnant parcels that are still owned by Triangle Brick. If the planning commission considers the current zoning of the 100 acres that we are discussing tonight, it is zoned rural residential, which allows for homes to be built with septic tanks. I cannot think of a more environmentally degrading use than septic tanks near the US Army core land. Next is my educated guess that it would cost Sconnell properties well over $50,000 just to submit a development plan. In light of that cost, I hope the planning commission is familiar with our community's efforts about 10 years ago known as EEUDO or Environmental Enhancements to the UDO. Long story short, Durham has the strongest environmental standards relative to issues like stormwater, stream buffers and wetlands protections when compared to Wake and Chatham counties. Accordingly, I don't know what a development plan would accomplish beyond what the UDO already mandates in terms of protecting our region's environment. Next slide, please. In closing, I wish to address the tremendous benefits associated with this zoning map change. First of all, we have petitioned for annexation of this 235 acre industrial park. So it will generate a great deal of city tax base right next to RTP, which does not pay city taxes. This site is key for Durham's industrial recruitment since it has the best transportation infrastructure that I can recall for any development I have presented to the planning commission. Highway North Carolina 55 is a large multi-lane facility. And besides that, this site has convenient and very efficient access to NC 147, an interstate facility with a direct connection to RDU International Airport. Perhaps more important, I would estimate this site is about five minutes away from the Apple campus in the Wake County section of our TV. That proximity will allow Durham companies in this industrial park to be the vendors and suppliers to Apple and other RTP companies creating good paying jobs for our residents. This industrial park is permanently buffered by the U.S. Army core lands. And this site along NC 55 scored a 13 out of 14 in the industrial land use study issued by the planning department in October of 2020. Next slide, please. Since we do not have a development plan, I don't believe the issue of committed elements is relevant to this agenda item. But I would like to briefly share with the planning commission examples of Scannnell properties buildings in Durham. And many of you may have seen them driving around Durham over the past couple of years. Next slide, please. First one is candle science. Certainly for all your Christmas shopping needs, I encourage you to evaluate candle science for how you might find those stocking stuffers. This is an exciting company based here in Durham. And the Scannnell recently developed this and opened this facility for them along Ellis Road in the Durham freeway. Next slide, please. Our secure is at the corner of Alexander Boulevard. I'm sorry, Alexander Drive and Miami Boulevard. I hope you all have seen this. It is a first class headquarters building. Again, it's owned IL and it is a company that creates micro grids for clean and resilient energy supplies for hospitals, Oak Brook Oak Island, other important establishments that need to have redundancy for their power supplies. Next slide, please. Peter Millar is an apparel manufacturer and distributor primarily for the golf crowd. That's not me, but hopefully you're familiar with that brand. And again, this is a first class building that Scannnell developed for Peter Millar. And next slide, please. Lastly, Pfizer has developed a, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Scannnell developed a building for Pfizer. Again, within the city limits of Durham for providing space for that biotech company. So Scannnell hopes to build on these recent accomplishments in Durham with this new industrial park just outside of RTP. For all these reasons, we respectfully ask for your recommendation of approval. We'll be happy to answer any questions and we thank you for your time tonight. Thank you, Mr. Becker. At this time, I will turn to those who registered to speak. We have two individuals who indicated they would like to speak. However, I would still read off everyone's name to ensure everyone has a chance to speak. And if you are on the call and we should speak, please go ahead and raise your hand. And if you're on the phone, that's star nine to raise your hand. The first three people we have on our list are Lee Weaver, Lisa Orgren and Sarah Seligman. I'm gonna give each person three minutes to speak. And Lee Weaver, you may begin. Thank you for giving me a couple of minutes. Can everybody hear me? Yes. Okay. Hey, the property that we own is on 8295 Wake Road. If you're looking at the map, the larger portion that's requesting to be rezoned is, it's actually, it right in the Chatham County area that it butts. It's on the bottom left-hand corner. It butts up to the triangle brick property that was clear cut a couple of years ago. So we can very clearly see what would be rezoned and become industrial. We have about 13 acres there that, like many of the people on that road or small farms and residential and has a great value in that, being close to the triangle, we're concerned with rezoning to the industrial that that would impact the value of the property because it's actually in what's called a lost corner of Chatham County. When they put in Jordan Lake many, many years ago, it's actually solved that corner off from Chatham County. So we get no services from Chatham County and we get nothing from Durham County. My concern is, I don't suffer under the illusion that I'm gonna stop the development that we're speaking about here. My concern is future connectivity was brought up in some of the earlier hearings because if the planning department doesn't say, take a look at how are we impacting this area right around us here? We're gonna get a negative impact from a value of just an industrial part being right next to us, but there's no opportunity to connect to city services of water sewer, that type of thing later down the road. It really should have been a situation where Durham and Chatham County got together and when they cut it off with the lake, it should have been absorbed into Durham County, but that never happened and I'm not at the level to make stuff like that happen. But our request would be that if without any kind of plan or before any plan got approved, it would include basically a stub out of some type of way that if there was any type of development to where they could connect to the utilities because that would kind of offset the, where we would view the negative impact of the property coming in behind us there and then literally staring at warehouse buildings, whereas right now we share trees. And so the main emphasis for us would be somebody really looking at how can we not just put a big building right next to these folks and not give something in a way that down the road, if we decided the property needed to be developed that it could be. So that's my only requesting answer. Thank you, Mr. Weaver. Next is Lisa Orgren. And as a reminder, please state your name and address and then give your comments. Yes, my name is Lisa Orgren. I live at 1910 Pipord Court. That's at Audubon Park. I am the closest house to this proposed development in Audubon Park, north of the Corps of Engineer Land. I'm not for this development at this time, but because there's no plan, I find it odd that anyone would rubber stamp a change in zoning with absolutely no idea what is really gonna go there. The examples provided are not commitments to what could possibly be, are gonna go there. My understanding also is that this could be up to a million square feet of very large development on this property. Concerns about the environmental impact. There's a lot of wildlife back here. In fact, I had a bald eagle in my yard for about 45 minutes a couple of months ago. What's gonna happen to the habitat of all the, the wildlife back there. In addition, a large space like that, it's gonna have a lot of light. How much tree, how many trees are gonna be coming down? There's no commitment in it, the plan about the tree coverage, anything like that. So to me, it doesn't make sense to prove something without some kind of idea of what's going there. And thank you for your time. Thank you, Ms. Morgan. And now I will read off the remaining names we have. And none of these individuals signed up to speak, but if they would like to, I invite all to raise your hand. I'm either in the Zoom platform or by pressing star nine and on the phone. Those individuals are Sarah Seligman, Michael Pollock and Elizabeth Weaver. If any of y'all would like to speak, please raise your hand. And if anyone else would like to speak on this case, please raise your hand. Elizabeth Weaver, I see you've raised your hand. You were recognized to speak. Yes, I just have a few things to say. I was at the other meeting online and it seemed like at that time, the plan builder was giving a whole lot more information about what was going to come in there and be built. He even got down to the thing that said, probably three, it would take three years to build three buildings, one building a year. So that tells me large buildings. And then they went into how the trucks would be coming in and out. That's something I think really needs to be addressed because this neighborhood, research triangle park, which I worked many years, there's a lot of traffic and you've got to be mindful of how it's coming in, how it doesn't disturb everybody, these new developments down here. As well as, of course, I've been here since 1968. So I've seen a lot of changes. You don't stop progress, but you just plan for it so that everybody will be more satisfied than if they don't feel they're involved. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Weaver. And if you could state your address briefly before. 8295 Wake Road, Durham, North Carolina 27713. Thank you. Thank you. We have a phone number where there are hand raised. That's the number that ends in 4634. Please state your name for the record and address and make your comments. Thank you. Yes, thank you. I'm Elaine Rand and I'm speaking for my husband, Wayne Rand. We live at 59 Lost Elaine. We own the land that borders the west side of the subject property and have lived here for about 40 years. We have reviewed the rezoning petition documents and hereby respectfully ask that the Planning Commission do not support the petition for rezoning as in the current form. And some of the reasons are as follows. The petition has no detail regarding proposed development and totally open-ended. The development has outlined, has outlined is out of character with the community. Third, the development will likely have several negative impacts on our property regarding future employment, enjoyments, excuse me, of our land. And the development does not address potential negative impacts to the community such as increased traffic on local roads. And again, please consider making a recommendation to the council to not support this petition. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Ms. Rand. Lori Smith, I see you have your hand raised as well. Please state your name and address and you have three minutes to speak. Hi there, yes. My name is Lori Smith and I live at 1906 Piperwood Court. I am the neighbor of Lisa Orgren and I absolutely share her concerns and the other concerns that I've heard about how on the map this really does appear at least that one end of the diagram very close to Lisa and my backyard. And like she said, there is a lot of wildlife and we really don't want to see that being encroached on. And with what has been mentioned already, I agree we don't have anything real concrete for us to be saying, okay, we're willing to give up our backyard. It just seems like we need more specificity on that. And that's what I've got. Thank you. And I see Michael Pollock, you have raised your hand to speak. You have three minutes to state your comments. Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah, I made most of my comments in the email that I sent you. I just wanted to say I had some concerns. The one was what is the larger transportation plan involved here? Like I'm getting conflicting information about whether a road is going to be extended from Hobson in 55 to Grandale, what's going on with that and widening of Grandale. And also whether industrial rights would that include greenhouse construction? I guess that might fall under research and developments. And that would be a large source of light pollution. There's some research greenhouses on CW Alexander and it causes a lot of, and you can definitely see it miles away and the people living closer to it. When it's cloudy, you can go outside and read a book. So it's a major source. And I'm wondering if that sort of thing could be included here and it would have a major impact in the neighboring communities across Northeast Creek. So, and we're also relating to light pollution. I'm just concerned about parking lots and area life and things shining into the woods. And another thing in the report will be the application document. It says that there wouldn't be construction north of the power line, but I don't think that's a commitment. So, they might change that plan depending on circumstances. Let's see, anything else? Also, I was wondering if there's a issue of scientific relevance. Like I think the clay pit has been used for paleontological research and I'm just thinking of that concern. But I guess my main points are just what's going on with the road situation and whether greenhouses might be included. I just think that as other people said, it's kind of seeming on why to approve a large project about knowing exactly what's planned where they're thinking to be like, would the building be close to the houses across Northeast Creek or would they be further down the other way? And what's going on with this road and they're actually going to be a major new road put in. And I mean, there's already a road there, Wake Road and the connecting roads. So that sort of thing. Thank you, Mr. Pollock. If you could finish your thought, you're at over three minutes. Yeah, I said basically everything, except also adding if they were going to build a road, I'm sure there would be a lot of blasting and all that and that would disturb the neighborhood, but that's basically all I had to say. Thank you. And Sarah Seligman, so you have your hand raised. And you are, I'm curious if you may not do so. Hi there. My name's Nick Seligman. I'm just speaking for Sarah. We're at 1101 Haven Tree Road during North Carolina. Really short, actually just wanted to be known that our number one concerns are light pollution and getting clarity over light pollution and noise and the time in which noise is made. You'll enjoy a quiet neighborhood aside from the drag racing cars on Friday nights. And we would just, it's important. Our home value is important to us and loud noise that strange hours and light pollution, it would just be great to gain clarity over that. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any other attendees who would like to speak? If so, please indicate by raising your hand or pressing star nine if you're on the phone. Seeing none, I will now move to close the public hearing. And if any commissioners would like to speak ask questions at this time, please raise your hand to be recognized. Commissioner Carmen Williams. Yes, thank you, Chair Aminolia. The community concerns are definitely valid. I understand where they're coming from with this and giving this year size of this particular proposal and with so much uncertainty in terms of what may be going on in this particular area. I definitely have some concerns. I don't know that I'm really prepared to write a blank check for what may or may not go on in this particular area. And I do understand that there are certain environmental protections that are already in place because of the Army Corps of Engineers and because of a few other things. However, I don't know, this is massive. I don't know, this is massive. This is a massive amount of land that I don't feel comfortable clear-cutting. I don't feel comfortable cutting a blank check for whatever happens to land here. And I mean, though the other buildings do appear to be I guess substantial or environmentally friendly, they do all kind of have the same outline facade or outline, I guess, architectural commitments. They all kind of look the same. I don't think that that really matters here given where it's located. It's just that a hundred acres is a lot. Like that's a whole lot without knowing really what will go here. And when we would possibly know what goes here besides saying, hey, we've rezoned it, we've cut the check now, just go and do whatever you feel like is necessary or you like, I don't agree with that. If I have more specifics about what could potentially go here, what it would serve, what the layout would look like, are you gonna have some type of tree preservation, some type of tree skate within a hundred acres? I mean, just in general, there's nothing besides we wanna use it and it's for sale and let's do something with it. I don't know. And the neighbors definitely raise quite a bit of questions in terms of what this would look like. And again, the sheer size of it is concerning to me without any type of anything besides what they've done previously. So those are my comments. Thank you, Commissioner Williams. Commissioner Durkin, you were recognized. I'm just echoing, thank you. Echoing what Commissioner Williams said and what the neighbors also said about having such a large site of 105 acres without having a plan or other development plan or if the intended use. So we were really in the dark here. So I'm not comfortable voting for it. I also, yes, there are certain limitations or minimums in the UDOs for tree coverage, preservation, that kind of thing. But for 105 acres, we wanna see a lot more than the minimum for many things. I also just advise the applicant to put in the development fee into their development budget. Thanks. Thank you, Commissioner Durkin. Commissioner Sees, you were recognized. Thank you. Quick question for the applicant. The material that's provided to us includes a conceptual utility plan that shows, I'm scrolling through the document right now to try to find it again. It shows a clear outline of proposed developable area, but there's not a development plan. And I would like for you to address the delineation of what's shown on that conceptual utility plan. And maybe staff can pull that up for everyone to view to speak about the development area that's shown on that plan versus the decision not to include a development plan with the rezoning application. And the decision, I guess, to include other parcels on that conceptual utility plan. I think it's sheet 34 of the agenda packet. There you go. Can you hear us now? Can you hear us? Yes. Okay. Yeah, it's so hard to figure out who's muted and who's un-muted. We, I'll defer to Kelsey Westwood who's our site engineer, Commissioner Sees, to delve in on that, but... Before you, could I just... Alexander, could you try to pull up maybe, is it possible to pull up sheet 34 of the agenda packet, which is the... Commissioner Sees, so you're looking for something, that's in the, that's okay. You're looking for a sheet in the actual packet. I thought you were talking about his presentation. I'm sorry. Correct. I'll get that in just a second for you. Great. Okay, great. Thanks. I can start giving kind of an overview of what he's going to pull up. So he's pulling up the SUDs, which is a summary of utility development statement. And that's basically a requirement. That's part of the application package. So the utility department will look at this as part of the annexation, since there is an annexation with this rezoning case. And they, since it's such a large, large site, wanted to see a little bit more detail about potential utility location. Obviously this is not, you know, maybe the exact plan of what will be proposed, but this is a good example of potential development areas, potential utility locations, and basically just showing that it's feasible to serve the site from a utility perspective. So we've just included some outlines of development areas just to kind of show an example of what could be there. Right. And we have, we have no identified companies or tenants. The Scannella is open to doing build the suits for certain companies. And they also do multi-tenant buildings for certain companies. So these are simply just building areas. They don't reflect anything because we don't know anything in terms of actual buildings because we don't have any information upon which to delineate what the size of any proposed buildings within the 235 acres would be. Keep in mind the, the 135 acres along NC 55 is already zone IL without a development plan. That would just go straight to a site plan, administrative site plan approval. If we had a company or a building identified, we'd be able to do that. But at this time, we don't have any companies. We're certain they're going to come because it's no secret that our, our, our nation's supply chain from China to California has been under duress. And now it is going to be much more important for manufactured products to come in through the Eastern Seaboard. And so it's, it's no secret we're going to have to have developments for that type of those types of uses up and down the Eastern Seaboard. As our nation moves forward dealing with the supply chain challenges that we have on the West coast. So that's helpful. Thank you for addressing that. I think it's important for anyone. Particularly members of the public who may have been looking through the documentation who came across that sheet to understand that. Number one, based on what I think you just described, there's, there's nothing. That is in any way set or stone or that sets up a, even in really an expectation that that is what. The ultimate developable area would be for there's, there's no. Commitment being proposed either text or otherwise, certainly that addresses the existing property that's owned I L. And nor is that the case with this portion of the property, which is, which is the subject of the case tonight. And I think that is, is. Important to point out because of the way in which the discussion has been, originated first with the historical uses and, and indeed that current ownership still remains triangle brick and the evidence of, of the past uses on the site with the borrow pits, not on the subject parcel, but on the adjacent parcel, which is the portion of the plan and that conceptual utility plan. That does not show developable area there, but there's nothing that would require that to be the case from a, from a planning and zoning perspective. Is that correct? Yes. That's, that's a fair statement. Okay. So I, and I think that goes to, and if, if, Danny, if you want to take that off now, that's fine. That off this, the screen share. I think that goes to, I think that goes to, I think that goes to, I think that goes to, I think that goes to, I think that goes to, I think that goes to, I think that goes to, I think that goes to, I think that goes to the slide we're talking about now. That's fine. That off this, the, the screen share. I think that goes to some of the comments that we heard tonight from, from the public and concerns I have as well. Regarding the uncertainty of what's being proposed. And I, if, if I heard you correctly, Mr. Biker. I even heard you say, well, what would a development plan. and I think that could still be done in a very general manner that would preserve a great deal of flexibility. I think it could address the relationship to this existing IL land if it was your choice to do so, but cause that's where the starkest, and I don't mean that necessarily in a negative way, but that's where the clearest indication of the past use is this property for the borough material with triangle bricks history of occupying this site. I think that's very clear. The other item that I think we've all heard loud clearly are concerns over light pollution, which is understandable given the relationship of this property to just not the immediate surroundings necessarily, although we did hear from the applicants, I'm sorry, the property owners immediately to the West, but from people who just generally live in the area. I don't at all have concerns about industrial uses in this location in general, although I absolutely have concerns about just rezoning the property to IL without some, both a development plan and some commitments that speak to some of the concerns we've heard, namely, what portions of the site are to be preserved, what those buffers look like, because in this case, I think buffers are important, particularly relative to uses to the South and from an environmental perspective, relative to the core lands to the North, those can be managed, but I'm not comfortable leaving it in the hands of the existing ordinance, which is what we would be doing if this property was rezoned as has been requested without a development plan. And lastly, I would just say that, I think this is a place where the question of whether Hobson gets continued over to Granddell, that's important. We kind of heard two different perspectives, I think from members of the public, some saying, we don't want connections, we don't want the change that that would bring, and then others saying, well, if the project's gonna go there, we'd like to have access to the potential services in the form of utilities and our transportation access that would be provided. And I can understand those differences of viewpoints. And so I think there would be value in being more specific about what that would look like, but those are secondary to this larger concern I have of having this presented to us tonight without a development plan. And that's only been heightened, those concerns have only been heightened, if you will, from the standpoint of the discussions about light pollution. Lastly, which I already said once, so I'm gonna say it again, there is an interesting history to this site, Triangle Brick, there's evidence of that in the landscape. And when we speak about the goals and objectives, there's a reference to sense of place, there's a reference to culture, there's a reference to the history of our communities. And I think that the history of the Triangle Brick quite plainly is played in North Carolina and certainly in our region is part of that. And I would have no problem, I would, let me rephrase that, I would encourage some consideration of a way of acknowledging that because it's being acknowledged in the ask, if you will, it's being acknowledged saying that, well, this was for a mine for brick manufacturing. And thus, there's an implied expectation that IL industrial zoning makes sense. I actually think the history of the brick borrow pits here has a deeper cultural significance and should be part of what is in some way acknowledged when the goals and objectives of the comprehensive plan speak about the history and culture of our communities. So I'm not in favor of the project as presented, that doesn't mean I'm opposed to an industrial use here in the form of rezoning at some point in the future if it was associated with a development plan that began to address some of those concerns that we've heard tonight. So thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Cease. Are there any other? Yes, Commissioner Baker, you are recognized. Thank you, and I'll be brief because I think Commissioner Cease reflected a lot of the thoughts that I had on the site in terms of being open to many potential uses on this site. But as Commissioner Williams pointed out, this is an absolutely huge site. It's an absolutely huge site. The previous two cases were, I think, difficult decisions and that's why we had split boats on those. Really could have gone either way. There were good things or challenges about each of them. But in either case, both of those proposals were significantly smaller than this proposal. And this one is 10 times larger than each of those previous cases. Every rezoning case that we have before us is a discretionary decision, which means that we have a lot of latitude about the reasons why we support or don't support the cases that come before us. And we have the comprehensive plan to help guide us, the goals and policies and objectives that were just recently adopted to help guide us. This case has so little information. So the request is to be able to annex into, well, the request to City Council will be to be able to annex into the city and to, I guess, for lack of a better way of saying it kind of what Commissioner Williams said, kind of a blank check and being able to do a lot of different things on this site. And I would just remind fellow commissioners that we had a case last month where it felt like we had really struck a new cord and we're headed in a new direction. There was a developer who felt that they had to come forward with a very, very serious proposal with a number of commitments for sustainability. And other elements that made the proposal consistent with or at least more consistent than usual with the comprehensive plan, the goals and objectives. Again, we have a lot of difficult decisions that we have to make on this commission. And every once in a while, there's a case that comes before us that it's just such an easy yes or no. And in this case, it's hard to imagine an easier no vote than this case. There is so little justification for why we should approve this case. I have seen almost nothing that has convinced me that this is something worth approving. So, and one thing I will say is, although it seems like a very easy no, we always have the opportunity to extend cases if we actually want to work with the applicant to try and improve them. That might be worth something to consider on this one. I'm not even sure if we're there. So, I just wanted to raise that and I'll leave it there and listen to what my other commissioners have to say. Thank you, Commissioner Baker. Commissioner Herrod, you are recognized. I'm unmuted. Yes. Okay. I just like to say there are some very good reasons for this development. It is a huge piece of property which gives it a benefit because you can do a lot more with it. I think the need is great in this part of the county for this type of use because RTP restricts itself as to what could be done in that part of the, in that development, you know, low manufacturing and a lot of the restrictions where this site could be a tremendous extension of the park and provide jobs in different fields. Also, the access is tremendous with all the whole highways close by. And as far as impact on the other areas around it, I think the core of engineering land and the Duke Energy Eastman provides protection. Obviously in Wake County, you know, they're going industrial type of development and then you've got an R30 high density residential besides that. So I too think that it would be so much better if we had a development plan where we would know, have more detail about what is actually going to happen there. So I'm conflicted in that regard, but I do think I hope that if it is negative, I hope to come back with something that can improve. So that's, that's my two cents. Thank you, Commissioner Herod. Commissioner Cutwright, you are recognized. Appreciate it, Chair Mendoza. I think that for me, the benefit of this particular conversation has been, I think that this conversation has been beneficial in that, you know, when I initially looked at this at the, oh yes, you know, it's going to, they do really good properties sort of looked at the building area, you know, granite. I guess it's not, it's not committed. But my initial thought was this makes perfect sense. You know, this would be a great, great development here. I don't see what the big deal is. The light pollution is something I had not considered. I think that's a reason for concern, potentially for neighbors. And I think it's something as simple as committing to that building envelope. To me, it seems simple enough that you've got all the flexibility you could possibly need. And just to say, look, we won't go past the due power easement. It's, I mean, it's really that simple. And then, you know, anyone in that neighborhood north should have almost no concern being a thousand feet plus away. You know, so I don't know if there's an opportunity here. Maybe this is a process question for staff and frankly, for the applicant. If there's a process to sort of quickly get through a site plan and come back in two sessions or two rounds, if that's, I don't know if that's possible. You know, again, I think that this is relatively, I think I could be wrong here, but I think this is a relatively simple request. And the building envelope is, you know, that sort of writes itself. It's really a simple thing. And then addressing maybe how you can impact or avoid having a significant light pollution is probably the second major item. I mean, maybe there's a couple others, but to me, those are the two things that stood out loud and clear to me. So I think that's a question for staff and the applicant is whether that's possible to come back or does that restart the process? Does this get real complicated? And it doesn't have to be. Maybe you can help me understand that a bit. Commissioner Cut, right. This is Danny Kultra. Yes, to answer your question, if the applicant were to switch gears and come back in with a zoning request with a development plan, we would have them start over with a new application. They would need to start the process. And Danny, Michael and I have been messaging about this. So I wanted to bring Michael on. Sure. Would the applicant be able to pursue a text only development plan if they wanted to go that route instead at this point? They could. And Michael stuck with the plan department. They could. And that's a transition that can be made with this application. The ordinance actually does anticipate that kind of switch or change in an application. But it would be hard. Based upon the comments we're hearing, a lot of them are graphically oriented in terms of building envelope, tree preservation areas, that kind of thing. So a text only development plan's possible, but I'm not quite sure what it would address based upon the comments we're hearing. Mr. Schroek, I'll turn it back to you. I know you had also asked that question to the applicant. Yeah, can you hear me okay? Yes. Great. Yeah, we're certainly open to a text only development plan. That would preclude some of the more less desirable uses that are permitted in the IL district. We're certainly open to that because that's certainly not a text canal properties intention. And we would certainly be able to add another text only commitment that we would have no development north of the power easter, which would mean any development would be, as you saw in the PowerPoint that we shared with you, that means any development would be at least a thousand feet away from the nearest home. And my reading of UDO section 7.4.3 about mandatory light standards is that at our property line, and we could even say at the edge of the power easter and if you so are so inclined, the allowed lighting at a property line is one half of a foot candle. So if it's one half of a foot candle, a thousand feet away from somebody's backyard, I have a hard time believing that's really gonna be noticeable. So we're certainly open to that. We'd like to move forward with that. And it seems to me that's a straightforward fix to these conditions that really are not, certainly, Schenells intend to be a great neighbor. They've done that along Alexander Drive where that power secure building is across from residential neighborhood. And obviously much closer to houses than anything we're talking about tonight. And so we, I agree with what Mr. Stock shared with the planning commission that can be added at this juncture without costing the process project any time. I'll have anything else, Chair. Thank you, Commissioner Morgan, you are recognized. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Question for the applicant. I was kind of following on with the lighting itself. Could the applicant consider committing to any kind of lighting that would reflect downward that would minimize any kind of light pollution? I know there's lighting that usually sometimes could be put in parking lots or areas around that would not be going up into the area and that might affect the neighboring properties themselves. Or is that what you were kind of talking about there, Patrick? Yes, Commissioner Morgan. Again, that's a standard regardless of whether it's parking lot, building lighting doesn't matter at the property line. It can only measure one half of a foot candle at the property line. And we could have a text only development plan which would say only one half of the foot candle along the southern edge of the Duke power easement. Okay. Well, thank you. And I guess the other question I was looking at the, that page 34 of our plan there, you're looking to, you could build by right, almost the right half of that plan as it is today since it is zone IL. And what you're looking for is to develop into the other area as well. Is there a reason where you could do things a little differently if you didn't get this thing approved that you would actually use only half of that area? That's, I'm afraid that's too speculative for us to answer, Commissioner Morgan. We tried to develop this holistically because as we've shared the 200, of the 235 acres, a hundred acres has been timbered at least twice. And on the 135 acres along Highway 55, those are the brick pits that Triangle brick used for the last 50 years. So it really is sort of a, it's not a brownfields, that would be an exaggeration, but it is a reclamation site for lack of a better term. And so we really think it's important for these industrial areas that served our community very well for a number of decades, but there's obviously gone past the end of their lifespan. And so this, these industrial parks that I think as Commissioner Herrod alluded to, we really need these to compliment RTP. RTP has been a tremendous asset for Durham for the last 50 years, but it does have significant restrictions on the types of jobs that can be created for our residents. And so in order to compliment RTP, these types of industrial parks are absolutely essential in my, from my perspective, having worked on economic development in Durham County for almost 30 years. Okay, thanks for the clarification. I yield back. Thank you, Commissioner Morgan, Commissioner Busbee, you are recognized. Thanks, Chair Amandolia. And Patrick, I'm going to circle back to the conversation you were having with Michael Stock and I just want to make sure that I understood it, but also wanted to ask you, are you, you sound like you're willing to potentially shift gears from this proposal without a development plan to a text only proposal? Is that, did I hear that correctly? Yes, sir. And would that be, is that a two cycle extension? What are you comfortable potentially having us do tonight that would give you the time to explore that opportunity and bring something back to us? We were hoping we could make those changes that we stated on the record tonight and go to the, and be, have you all vote tonight and let us go to the city council. So we made those statements on the record. We're happy to wordsmith it because the text only development plan can be added at any point in the process. We could add it the day before we go to the city council just to pick another date, but we're committed to do that as soon as possible. As soon as we can wordsmith everything that would, we would go through the list of IL uses, strike off the uses that are obviously less desirable and that's canal properties has no intention of pursuing and then make sure that we addressed the lighting issues so that there'd be no, the lighting measure, measurement would be at the southern end of the southern edge of the Duke power easement. Since that appears to be the primary concern and in conjunction with that, the coral area of course is that there'd be no development north of the Duke power easement either, which means that there'd be in effect a 1000 foot buffer between anything's canal properties develops and the nearest homeowners. Okay, thanks for that clarification. And Michael and Danny, is that something from a staff perspective you're comfortable with doing that all this evening? Excuse me, commissioner Bosby, are you talking about the commitments for something this evening to the text only development plan? Can I ask, cause I know staff has often said sometimes that a lot of commitments on the fly, you wanna, we always just check with you out of habit to make sure, I'm not sure I'm comfortable making all those changes without then having public comments. But I wanted to just find out, is the staff comfortable, just as a starting point? I need to speak with my group, but at this point, I wasn't sure whether we'd be comfortable with that because they'll still need to show that we probably would want it to come back because we would need to vet out some of these proffers to make sure that one, they are tied to the actual use because that is what is only allowed with the text only development plan has to be related to the use. So if some of these things they're adding, we would have to make sure that the commitments are written in a way that they're consistently tied to the use only. Well, I'll give you a moment to confer a staff and Patrick, I just wanted to circle back it. If the staff needs time is one cycle enough, it seems like you have a sense of what you might put forward. I personally would rather have this come back because I would love to hear again from the members of the public because it's a different proposal. But what's your sense? And then I wanna hear from the staff as well. I mean, if we could bring, we could write the text only development plan and get it to the planning staff easily this week. And so we would like to have it brought back to the commission on November nine. Okay. I mean, I don't mean to minimize this. These are important issues. And again, we were very well aware of the fact that the UDO standard was one half of a foot candle. So given that, just given the facts on the ground today, that means the light measurement would be one half of a foot candle, at least 500 feet away from the nearest home. But if it makes the planning commission more comfortable for us to eliminate the area north of the Duke power easement, which creates a 1000 foot buffer, we can do that and we can write that up as a text only. I'll eliminate a number of uses because I agree with Mr. Kultz's point. And then relative to that state that development north of the Duke power easement will be precluded and that the light standard would be pursuant to UDO article seven, and that would be measured on the south side of the Duke power easement. So it's really only like three or four bullet points. That's it. Great. Thank you, Patrick. And Michael, I guess just to follow. And then Michael, after you chair, Amidolia, those are my questions and comments. So I'll let Michael speak just to follow up on my question about staff and then I yield. Okay. Oh, sorry, sorry. Staff really is more comfortable with at least 60 days. I'm sorry, but 60 days would be a minimum for staff to really go through and make sure that the language is correct, that it meets UDO requirements and such. And also, yeah, that would be our minimum requirement. Thank you, Michael. And Mr. Becker, would you like to provide a response to that? Does that, would that timeline be something y'all would be interested in pursuing? We're not happy about it, but if that's where we have to go, that's where we'll go. But this is, I think we're looking at, again, I need to stress that 10 years ago, our community had a very in-depth process called environmental enhancements to the UDO. And I don't know why that's being thrown under the bus. That was a major undertaking by the environmental community, the development community. And we came forward with standards that are much higher than Wake or Chatham County. And based on my experience in economic development, where we are focused on recruiting industry and competing against Wake County, I can tell you their standards are more lenient. So in terms of recruiting, high quality industrial space and jobs to our community, we're essentially negotiating against ourselves. And so I would say that we'll write this up as quickly as we can, get it to the plan department. And we really do need this to move forward in December. Thank you. I see two commissioners have their hand raised. And I want to recognize them to have their comments. I will say to me, it would be helpful to start shifting this conversation to figure out what we want to do with this case. To me, it seems like we have two options. One is to pursue a 60 day continuance to provide the applicant time to make commitments and staff time to review those commitments or to vote on it tonight. And I would welcome commissioners' thoughts and feedback on which of those pathways to pursue. But, and I will go ahead and recognize commissioner Carmen Williams. Thank you, Chair Mendoza. Given the light of the situation and definitely the tone of the conversation, I don't think that we actually should push this to an external vote 30 or 60 days. If they are prepared to take what we have for them today, our recommendations to go towards city council and our comments, then I think that we should go ahead and do that. And it's not just in terms of trying to appease us, but there's a community that also needs to be considered. And the planning department has said that they need 60 days. And if they feel that the need justifies the means, then I think that we should go ahead and cast a vote on this and then let the powers to be sought out the rest of this. Given what I've heard from this particular developer, though they have done some phenomenal work within the city of Durham and with this particular project, I don't think that there will be much more sway in terms of how they feel and what they're willing to present going forward. So I think that the text commitments at best would be a minimum effort. And I think we need a little bit more than that going forward, given the sheer size of this project. So I agree with you. With the two options that we have, I think we should vote tonight. Thank you, Commissioner Williams. Commissioner Baker, you were recognized. I actually kind of agree with Commissioner Williams, although I was going to say that, I would support 60 day extension, although I agree with what Commissioner Williams said and why she said it in terms of the tone. I would encourage developers, if they don't want delays in their case, they should bring the right case to us and they should do the work upfront before bringing cases. There are a lot of people who are on this call. There are a lot of commissioners here, staff is here, applicants are here and we need to see serious cases that come before us. So if people are unhappy, if applicants are unhappy when they come to us, then that's not on us. That's on us making sure that we get serious applications on very, very large and in very, very important cases of over a hundred acres. So I think that that's an important thing. So if the applicant, whatever we decide tonight, if we decide to vote tonight, we decide to push it back 60 days. You know, if the applicant comes back in 60 days, then we'll reevaluate what has been proposed. And if all that has changed is some foot candles, then I'm not sure that's gonna get us to where we need to be. And then we can take a vote, we can reevaluate and take a vote then and send it forward to city council and we'll see what they have to say. So that's what I wanna say, echo some of the things commissioner Williams said. And I would like to hear what some of the other commissioners have to say in terms of whether we should vote tonight or we should back 60 days. Thank you, commissioner Baker. I will recognize commissioner Durkin. Thank you. I just wanted to echo some of what I've said, but also note that many of the concerns raised by the neighbors were, I don't think would be adequately addressed on tech-only development plan. And they're really like what Michael Stock said, the graphic concerns or things, concerns that would be reflected in a graphic on a development plan. So I think we should vote tonight. And I don't think a tech-only development plan shown to us in 60 days is gonna appease anyone or everyone. Thanks. Thank you, commissioner Durkin and commissioner Cutwright, you're recognized. Thank you. Before commissioner Durkin just say what she said, I was gonna say the opposite. And so maybe I need some clarity on what wouldn't be addressed with the building envelope and the light. And so maybe I'm just missing it, but what else would need to be addressed outside of that? And sorry, and just to finish that, I'm fine voting either way. I think that this gets us there. And so I'd be happy voting either way today or in 60 days and probably the same direction, which is for assuming those tech commitments get in place. Thank you, commissioner Cutwright. And would it, referring to your first question, would it be helpful to have staff reflect the commitments they have heard so far tonight to give us clarity on what would be addressed by this text, provide these updates? Danny or Michael, whoever has the best list, maybe you can tag team, could you speak to what you've heard tonight as potential commitments? Well, they've been going quick. So I'll try to recap. And if anybody can else can chime in to back me up on that. One is the main one I heard first was that they would look at committing to limit certain types of uses and then also that limit the developments to being of those uses to being south of the actual power easement. And then the other was to try to wordcraft some type of commitment to the use that would limit foot candles in certain areas. And I'm not sure beyond that, if there were any others. I didn't hear anything else, Danny. This is Michael Stock. I think that's a correct list. That's what I thought too. Great. Thank you both. Okay, at this time, I will recognize commissioner Cease. Yeah, I appreciate the detailed conversations we're all having here. And I want to both concur and commend Commissioner Durkin for stating my concerns exactly. I don't think the text only commitment captures the concerns that we heard from the public. It doesn't capture some of the concerns that I have. I think the concerns have really been whittled down quite creatively to a very narrow list of not above the due power easement and oh, the ordinance is good enough on light pollution because we spent all this time 10 years ago nailing environmental concerns into the ordinance. And I don't think that captures at all the sentiments that were expressed tonight. I think the sense conveyed by staff early on in the discussion that the concerns extended to more of a graphical nature fall closer to where my inclination is. And it's not out of an interest of delay. I don't like delaying projects. But I also am not comfortable with the way in which the text commitments are being discussed here as being sufficient. And there might be a minor improvement, but I don't think they're substantive and I don't think they're sufficient in addressing the complexity and scale of the issues that arise out of a project of this size in this particular location, which again, has a great transportation access, but also a lot of challenges, given that it's right up on the county line, two different counties bordering to the South and the environmental conditions are, you know, the string corridor, core lands, et cetera to the North. So I don't, Commissioner Durkin stated it perfectly well in terms of where I am on this one. Thank you, Commissioner Cease. Are there any other commissioners who would like to speak at this time? So before I will say how I feel about which way we move forward, I would like to just point out that 10 years ago, we were having a lot of different conversations in this country than what we are today in 2021. What the community did 10 years ago while a valiant effort and while we're respectable and deserves to be recognized, does not mean that that is what we should settle for. I think 10 years ago, climate change was a good conversation, but it was not by any means mainstream in my mind the way it is now. And I think it's worth recognizing that progress does have a potential to move quickly. And I think the changes that we're seeing discussed tonight about what was upgraded 10 years ago compared to now is a sign of that, that progress has been moving rapidly. I would also point out while Research Triangle is an incredibly important part of our community and our region, it has not always been the most equitable location. And so I expressed concern to having that stapled as the shining example of our region. I think that is a good site for our region and a good economic driver for our region. And I think that is something we should strive to improve upon not just maintain. And lastly, I understand that borders exist but the concept of competing with Wake County is not one I am personally interested in. I would love to see Durham, Orange and Wake counties continue to work more collaboratively. And I would love to see Wake County meet us and our standards around environmental protection as we are trying to address some of the concerns that both our communities and our nation are expressing. As far as how we move forward, I personally share the view of commissioners, I'm not sure at this point that a text-only development plan would get us where we want. I first thought of it as a potential way forward, but I personally would prefer to go ahead and vote on this tonight. I will accept either motion and we can move forward with that. And I guess before we do so, I'd like to ask Michael a process question. If we were to have a motion for a continuance and it were to be declined, would we then need to vote for the case tonight to move it forward with a recommendation? Yes, yes. So that might be helpful context to someone, but unless someone else would like to speak, I would accept a motion at this time. Chair, I move that we move forward. Case number Z21 quadruple 049 forward to the city council for approval for the 55 and Hopson case. Clarification on that chair. Yes. So commissioner Morgan, you're suggesting as is. Yes. Yes. With with the. Yeah. With modifications that have been stated. I'll clarify that. With the text clarifications that the applicant has committed to. Michael, are those. Do we have text commitments from the applicant at this time? Are we considering those? No. The application before you as a straight IL rezoning. Okay. So the motion on the floor is moving this forward to the city council with a favorable recommendation as a straight. Zoning as is. Second. Okay. Moved by commissioner Morgan, seconded by vice chair Cameron. Maybe have the roll call vote. Sure. Amondola. No. Baker. No. Busby. No. Cameron. No. Cut right. No. Durkin. No. Herod. No. Not here. MacGyver. No. Morgan. No. Cease. No. Carmen Williams. No. No. Zuri Williams. No. The motion fails 012. Thank you, Michael. And thank you to the applicant team. We, that concludes our public hearings for the evening. We would now turn to our new business. The first item. On our new business is a presentation. Of the 2050. Metropolitan. Transportation plan. Just providing us an update on that process. I see. We're getting close ish to our next two hour block. I think this presentation will be able to wrap up before then. But we will. Have the presentation and then. Time to discuss afterwards. Hello, everyone. My name is Andy Henry. Work for the Durham Chapel Hill Carburel Metropolitan Planning Organization. And I'm going to give you a pretty quick presentation. I'm just turning on the video to say hello, and then I'm going to sign off here. And it's a little easier to do the presentation. In the dark. So I'm going to give you a quick presentation. I'm just turning on the video to say hello. And then I'm going to sign off here to do the presentation. In the dark. So to speak. Because I'll be facing away from the camera. I'm going to see this. So let me share the screen, right? Okay. How is that? You all see that? Yes. Okay, great. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what the DCHC MPO is tonight. About the Metropolitan Transportation Plan. And I'll talk about some of our goals. We did for all Turner's analysis and the scenarios. We looked at some demographics for the triangle and a little bit of the metrics that we have for our plan. And first up, just to give you some background on this map here. If you look on the left, you see that purple line. That's the DCHC MPO planning boundary. And there's a blow up of it on the right. And blue. We do all the planning and programming for the state of the city of Durham. And we have a lot of transportation funding and all of Durham and a good, good part of Orange County, the urbanized areas of Orange County and Northeast Chatham County. So we have a board. And if you look at the lower left hand corner, you'll see some of the members on our board. Wendy Jacobs is the member from Durham County. Brenda Howerton is the alternate. And the city of Durham has two members, Charlie Reese and Pierce Freelon and Javier Caballero And so those are the people that make the decisions on our board. And we have, if you go back to the map on the left, we'll see there's a blue line over there. You see Raleigh and Wake County. We have a sister agency, the Capital Area MPO. And we do this Metropolitan Transportation Plan, the MTP that I'm going to talk about tonight. We do this together. And at red area, you see on that map, that's Triangle Regional Model Area. So we do modeling together. We do almost all our plans jointly. So what is the MTP? These are these concentric circles. They show different plans that we have. The first one is a comprehensive transportation plan. Big plan, lots of projects in there because we just need to show that there's a need for the project. As you move in that next, the second largest circle, that's the Metropolitan Transportation Plan. And it's a little smaller because there's fewer projects in there. And that's because it has to be fiscally constrained. We have to do a financial plan. We have to show that we have the revenue to cover the cost of our projects. The reason the MTP is important is because of that next circle you see with the cross hatches there, that's the prioritization process, NCDOT. And they score the projects and the projects that score the highest move into that last circle there. That's the TIP, the Transportation Improvement Program. And that's where projects get funded. So the importance of the MTP is the project has to be in the MTP. It wants to go through the prioritization process and get funded. So there's several milestones that you can see for development of a long range plan. We're now on the preferred option. That's the, as you move from left to right, that's the second to the last box there. Preferred option really is the draft plan. And we'll release that by the end of October. And then hopefully we'll be back in January or February to adopt our plan and then also show that our plan is going to meet the air quality standards. The emissions from the transportation sector will meet the thresholds for different pollutants. So that's the plan. So we started a long time ago with the goals and objectives that you looked far to left maybe a year and a half ago. We did a deficiency analysis. And then we looked at different alternatives to, you know, to address those deficiencies. We did it this summer. Now, as I said, we're on to, on to our draft plan. I just want to let you know, we've done a lot of public comment last year when we did a goal survey, we had over 2,000 respondents. And I'm just listing some of the high ranked policies and themes. And you can see biking and walking is important. Transits, increasing transit support, personal vehicle dependence, no reducing that, protecting environment, climate change came up a lot, supporting low income and minority populations to make sure they have access to the decision making. These are all highly ranked. We had another survey this past summer and some of the same themes, well, not some that really the same themes and policies rose to the top again recently. So we did an alternatives analysis this summer. We looked at, well, the reason we do it is we want to get the conversation going and about what projects are important, about what priorities are important for the MPO and preferred option is our draft plan as I said, we're coming up. We're not going to select one of the alternatives that we did, what we're going to do is we're going to take different pieces from the different alternatives to create that draft plan. So before we go any further, probably one of the most important things is to talk about some of the background information. If you look at infographic on the left, that is the population and job growth in the triangle. From 2020 to 2050, you can see very fast growth. 1.9, we're adding 1.2 million people at 1.9 and the jobs are growing, 850,000 jobs. Really, really fast growth. If you look to the right, there's a table. There are actually two tables in that box. The top is population and the bottom is employment. It shows the population employment growth from 2016 to 2050 and the second or third row down is Durham. Durham is going to grow 52% over that 34-year period. My employment is going to grow even further by 85%. So very brisk growth over here in the western end of the triangle. You'll see Chatham, it's not as big as Durham and Orange, but it's forecast for a population employment growth is even higher than Durham and Orange County. Land use, we used different land use processes here. You can go online and look at our maps and it'll show you density maps of where our employment is going to be where our population is going to be. This is showing the year 2050, showing Durham here. You can see on the left, the employment density, it tends to grow along the travel quarters and then around places like Duke University Medical Center and downtown Durham. Up north, you can see some development around there, around the medical facilities up there at the regional hospital and along Ben Franklin. On the right, the population density tends to be spread out a little bit more. You see the darker colors or the higher densities and those are in town. Again, especially around downtown Durham. But there's a lot of population increases out there, east Durham, south of NC 98, east of US 70 and northeast of Durham as well. We looked at three different scenarios. What we did is we started out with the plans and trends scenario. That's the first one you see on top and this is kind of the business as usual. What we do is we take the current land use plans and policies from all our jurisdictions and counties and we just extend those out to the year 2050 and then we take our current long-range transportation plan with the projects, the roadway widenings, transit services, et cetera and we put that in the model and we run that. That's kind of our business as usual. Shared leadership is the next step up. This kind of builds on the plans and trends. We increase the intensity and mix of land uses at major employment hubs and travel corridors. We add more transit, a few more roadways and then we move on to the altogether that builds on even further to those other scenarios. Pretty much the same land use but we have even more biking and walking facilities, more transit and we actually pulled some roadway projects out of this scenario especially ones that ran along bus rapid transit corridors or other corridors where we had really frequent transit service. Those are the three scenarios that we ran this past summer. I just want to show you how they fare. We ran these, we looked at these and compared them to a no-build scenario. The no-build scenario we call E plus C, existing plus committed. The graphic on your left, those bars, those vertical bars, blue ones show you the change in vehicle miles travel when you look at the no-build scenario, when you look at the three different alternatives or scenarios that we had. You can see the EMT goes up except for the last one, the altogether scenario. We had the biggest concentration of land use where we had the most transit. You can see the VHT, the vehicle hours of travel all went down from the no-build scenario. I will say that a lot of the measurement data that we pulled from these didn't really change all that much when you looked at travel time, travel distance and just in mode share, it didn't change much. It moved in the right direction as you move left from right from plans and trends and shared leadership altogether those different scenarios that we had. It did move in the right direction but it didn't really move all that much. Emissions, well in this table you have columns that show the emissions for the different scenarios and then along the left on the rows you've got the different pollutants carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, etc. If you look to the far right it shows the percent of change from today or actually 2016 to year 2050 and those first four pollutants they all go down, they all reduced. A lot of this is because vehicles are more efficient now more miles per gallon for the vehicles we have in our fleet and declining tailpipe emissions. That part's looking good. The one that doesn't go down is the CO2, the carbon dioxide. You see that still goes up 16% and as I said, one of the issues that really came up quite a bit in our public input towards climate change. These are some other performance measures kind of shown in an infographic. Again, you've got the three different alternatives we have in the three columns on the right on the left that gray column that's that no-build scenario that I talked about. If you look at the commute time it starts at 24 minutes in the no-build but it goes down to 21 minutes as you move left to right. Some of the other metrics here improve as well. If you go down say transit ridership about two thirds of the way down that row you can see that it increases as we move from left to right. Again, most of these metrics they improve. The last one shows the funding requirement and as you move left to right these alternatives got more expensive. We had more transit, more projects in there to address our transportation needs but they got more expensive as well. This is a congestion map. This shows the year 2050 in one of our alternatives when you see a yellow line that means that it's about 80 to 100% of capacity. Once you get to orange you're over capacity. If a roadway you carry 10,000 vehicles a day and it's at 11,000 it's going to show up as orange because it's going to be 1.1 what we call the V-oversea. The red lines are the ones that are at 120 capacity where you expect some longer delays. If you look there this includes all those roadway improvements. This includes widening of I-40 in Durham and Orange County widening of I-85 in Orange County the Durham Freeway the south part of it, south of East End Connector has been widened and you can still see there's a good bit of areas that are orange and some areas that are red especially in the Durham Freeway going through downtown Durham there. We're still expecting quite a bit of congestion even given all the improvements that we proposed and those different alternatives. Equity measures we have many measures but one thing we want to keep in mind is we move forward and as we propose our preferred option is some of the information on this slide this is for North Carolina it just says on average communities of color have lower vehicle ownership rates live further from work are more likely to depend on public transportation and are more likely to be involved in a crash as a pedestrian and if you see so more people of color ride transit if you look at the bottom left in the box there you'll see that the average transit commute is 43 minutes compared to just 24 minutes for driving so a bigger burden for commuting a bigger burden for finding work that's convenient et cetera we have lots of metrics lots of performance measures these to show a few of them we have ones in trade safety and travel time we also look at ones that look at the more urbanized areas where we have high concentrations of transit there's an example of an isochrome map there on the right it just shows what the commute shed is 15 minute increments from some of the key destinations so there's just a lot of data on our website that will compare these different alternatives our schedule is let me first talk about the public engagement I already talked about we had a survey we did some online workshops to get public feedback I presented the many local boards and commissions this is actually the last presentation I'm doing the commissions we didn't have any in person pop ups we did have some focus groups for our community's concern we have four different focus groups the people that participated that were either low income person of color or young or older aged person we had those focus groups to gather some information we had a public hearing at our board and we just gathered quite a bit of information on those alternatives there's a lot of information on our website I've already mentioned a few minutes ago there's maps you can look at that are interactive and provide a lot of information our next step is we're going to release that draft plan as I said in October we still have to coordinate with the Durham County Transit Plan that's coming up and the Orange County Transit Plan and as I said we hope to adopt in January February our final plan again the MTP it's a long range plan it goes out to 2050 it will list all the highway improvements that we expect to see widening modernizations perhaps manage lanes some type of tolling for the future it also lists the transit facilities and transit services that we we hope to implement for the year 2050 for instance commuter rail between Durham and Rale bus rapid transit possibly in the 1551 corridor between Durham and Chapel Hill between downtown Durham and North Carolina Central down the Durham freeway to RTP so it just lists a lot of the major projects that we hope to implement over the next 30 years and with that I know I've kind of gone through this pretty fast but I'll go ahead and take any questions that folks have Thank you Andy there is not a public hearing associated with this item as we will not be voting on this presentation tonight but we did have someone speak sign up to speak on this case so I wanted to give attendees who have stuck with us a chance to speak and I know Michael Pollock registered on this item if Michael if you would like to speak or if anyone else would like to speak please raise your hand and if you're on phone for a star night to do so and if you would like to speak I would give about three minutes for any comments from attendees I was just interested in hearing the presentation Great thank you no hands raised I'll move to comments yeah I'll move to comments from commissioners commissioner Carmen you were recognized thank you very much chair Mondolia I know it's been pretty active night so I'll be brief having been at one point in time a resident that used the city of Durham bus lines and use it as a mode of transportation to get to and from work I can appreciate everything that you guys are doing to widen lanes and to make investments into certain aspects but I find it disheartening that no one is considering what type of shelters will be provided if any for those who catch the bus and because I'm in a better financial situation now than what I was at the time when I did not have a personal vehicle I literally pray for people to stand in the rain and that's their only option because they're waiting on the bus and they have to carry groceries and I live on NC highway 55 and there is a covered bus stop near the Burger King going into downtown however people stand in the rain beside the metal stick with the little sign on it going towards South Point so I think that at some point in time a priority has to be taking care of the residents of shelters that are being provided and as I was reading through the plan the number of trips determines how or whether or not there will be shelters if there's 20 loads a day there's a shelter if there's 10 loads a day there's a bench and that just doesn't seem right since we're trying to get away from people using cars as much as they do I mean I definitely would catch the bus to go to downtown Durham from my home and then that eliminates the need for me to park but after a certain time buses only cycle every hour so after 9pm it's going to take me an hour to catch the bus to get back home when I could drive and it'll only take me 8 minutes so I think that route planning and different things like that probably need to be into consideration first before we start looking at what travel impacts will look like in 2050 because at the rate we're developing technology and people are going into space cars might be flying by then so I don't think we'll need many highways no pun intended but I just think that we need to put a little bit more consideration into how we address the need if we're going to increase the number of people that are taking the bus and their biking to different areas what those shelters would look like if we're going to increase the number of people that are taking the bus and then we're going to have more market experience and more rain more extreme weather more heat and I mean a three cents tax isn't really going to get us there and I think we could better allocate shelters because nobody wants to stand in the sun or the rain for 45 minutes waiting on the bus to get to them so that they could get where they're going having been a public transportation dependent at one point in time thank you thank you Commissioner Williams Commissioner Morgan you are recognized thank you thank you chair Andrew I know you had mentioned there was all these different road improvements and I know in having been concerned about some of the road improvements in the area which I live in is that the city seems to be reluctant the county is reluctant to spend money on any road improvements how is this supposed to be funded Andrew is these state funded improvements or is this going to the NCDOT priorities or what does this do yeah so most of the roadways in this plan would be funded by state federal funding there's not many roadways that would be built by the city I know the city has some I don't know if I can call it action fees but they do have some fees that they charge and after a while when they have a certain amount of money built up into the fund they will build some roadways for instance right now the city of Durham is widening Bay of Bill road from Cornwallis headed south down to Harvey Chapel that's that city funded Carver Street widening up north was city funded so you can see there's not very many city funded roads right one thing I will say when I this presentation is a bit aged but our board told us to not just have one draft preferred option they want us to have two they wanted one of them to have very few road widening very few so that's what we're doing we have kind of our traditional preferred option but we have another one that has many fewer road widenings and a lot more transit so some of those and just to Commissioner Williams to address what you said earlier I do understand and I know that quite a bit of the funding from the have since sales tax has been directed to build more bus shelters put more amenities out there for people that provide the transit system yeah I mean the only concern that I had was as I know we you know I live in the southeastern study area and the concern was with all these you know new developments being approved we did speak with the ncdot and asked where they were in the priority of some of these state roads and they were saying it wouldn't even be considered even until like 2035 and given that all these different new developments have been approved that the city council has approved and moved forward with our concern was the funding or the improvements that are needed with some of the roads that are in southeastern and I didn't I didn't see them on your map because I guess you're focused on the three county area not necessarily what's coming up close to Wake County and that was what I was looking for in your presentation as well the only roads we have in our plan out in that area is U.S. 70 and maybe a realignment of Leesville Road an extension of I can't remember an extension over to possibly Northern Durham Parkway. There aren't many roads there and those roads are on a lower tier so they don't receive very much funding right they're on the bottom of it and there's a lot of new homes to be built out in that area so that was my concern is just that you know where is the city going to do that I know other municipalities do do that and they do kind of fund some of these improvements especially when there is infrastructure needed so just my comments there Thank you Commissioner Morgan Commissioner Busby you are recognized thank you and Andy thanks for the presentation I was just going to say when you mentioned the second plan and the recent recommendation from the MPO to come up with that second plan that really looks at alternative expansions and not just widening roads there's a lot of excitement about that so I just wanted to say I think that's really that's an encouraging development and I look forward to seeing what that second plan is but I know a lot of citizens I've just seen and heard the presentation Commissioner Busby I think you cut out a little at the end so we missed your last sentence I don't know if you want to try and get that one out again there would any other commissioners like to make comments with that I would just say I hope that this was helpful for the context for everyone I reached out to I don't even remember who it was at this point I reached out to staff about this a couple months ago and they got it on the schedule so I hope being able to see kind of the broader picture of our future transportation plans will be helpful for some of our cases and next month we'll be getting an update on the county transit plan so that will provide a little bit more context and I want to thank Andy for coming and presenting and for sticking with us with that I'll go ahead and move to our next item which is our 2022 schedule I think we need to vote to approve that is that correct Michael that is correct Chair Amandolia is there any discussion on our 2022 schedule it wasn't in the printout and there wasn't an email that said our printout was different on the agenda if you click on it I have a printed agenda so there's nothing that said your printed agenda is outdated thank you so here are the dates for our proposed dates for our 2022 planning commission meetings is there any discussion on these and if not I would accept a motion to approve this meeting schedule I approve that we approve the meeting schedule second moved by Commissioner Morgan seconded by Vice Chair Cameron and maybe have a little call of vote Chair Amandolia yes Baker yes Busby yes right yes sorry yeah Harrod yes MacGyver yes Morgan yes Cease Carmen Williams yes Zuri Williams yes overwhelmingly approved congratulations on your new 2022 agenda calendar there's no debate okay the next item on our agenda is receiving an update on the redevelopment of Northgate Mall I want to ask staff because we're hitting up on what should be our two hour break for closed captioning how long do we think this presentation is going to be can we push through or do we need to take that break Bo Brinski's fine department here I think it would be fairly clear okay short presentation obviously ask questions but just a status update okay great so again I'm Bo Brinski I'm an assistant director with fine department and I oversee the site plan to be processed and was asked to come and speak and talk a little bit about the status of the Northgate redevelopment Chris Chris it may be having a hard time coming up right now we just see a blank screen sorry I'm having technical problems fair with me in one minute can you see now no we still see it or at least I still see a blank screen and I see some heads shaking one second please think is a sign Michael is it possible for us to discuss our December retreat while Chris sorts out his technical difficulties that would be a fantastic idea unless Chris is about to pull it up I'm still seeing a blank screen tease let's go ahead and discuss our December retreat sure so the dates that we have proposed and Grace maybe chime in but we're looking at the December 3rd or December 9th I don't think we have a time set Grace do we do we need to send out a poll and this was just more of a heads up for the planning commission or do we actually want the planning commission to decide now right sorry about that I think you can just share the dates and then we could send out a poll for a time of day and we normally meet in the evenings because everyone has day jobs and y'all seem pretty busy so normally we would meet in the evening like we did for the last one but we have narrowed down two dates that would work really well for our policy group they have a lot of meetings already scheduled well into the fall working on the comprehensive plan so I'll let Mike share those dates with you yeah so it would be December 3rd or December 9th and we'll send out a poll for the times and for which ones will work those are what the policy team works best for plus to get your input earlier rather than later in that comment period and if none of those you'll go back to the drawing board with different dates or times we will we're going to see who if there's a majority a strong majority for those days again if it's a very weak turnout for either of those in terms of what's the availability we will ask the policy team to reconsider different dates but we're going to start with those too and Michael since we're doing these retreats more frequently now I wonder if we could just have them become part of our regular schedule to me it seems like we had a sense of we're doing these every three months four months and we knew the date far up in advance it would make scheduling those a lot easier I'm not sure if other commissioners disagree with that but to me it's easier to just have it in the calendar and I'm unlikely to have something booked six months or six months in advance is that something that the staff would be able to do I can bring that up with them I think that question came up with them before and they were hesitant because they because their schedule does fluctuate in terms of when they're ready to present materials and get feedback for certain topics but we can bring it up again and I think it's a completely reasonable request okay sounds good are there any other comments folks would like to make I mean I have a lot of standing meetings on specific dates and so I know I missed the last one the last retreat and so it would just be good to have options different options to be able to participate if I share camera okay with that we will now go back to our update on the redevelopment of North Gate Mall thanks glad Chris Chair Mendelian alright just a brief summary of the site we're discussing I assume most of us are fairly familiar with the former North Gate Mall site roughly 46 acres about a mile north of our downtown at the intersection of Gregson Club and Gas Buchanan immediately it's it's zoned CC without a development plan it is adjacent to a 10 acre strip that is a zoned CG that does have a development plan also owned by Northwood Raven the entire site is owned by Northwood Raven who's a multi-family commercial developer they've done a couple projects in our jurisdiction the palladium apartments out in southwest part of Durham and then of course the Van Allen project downtown across from the Bull Stadium the former Macy's site of course is owned by Duke University glad Chris next slide this is a oops is it this is the area of the existing conditions at the site the mall is currently vacant I do think there's a couple of businesses that you have extra access to there in sort of the southwest part of the property and then of course the northwest corner of the property is that strip of CG that was referring to that's a fairly active shopping center with the plant fitness and a couple other retail establishments next here's the CC zoning district and its boundary and again the bright purple where there is a development plan this is CC without a development plan you can see it's much of the site but ID5 and Gregson to the east a couple of our to the south next slide so an application for a site plan preliminary plan was submitted August of 2021 by McAdams Engineering this was infrastructure only site plan there have been as a part of our coverings with them and of course as part of their voluntary engagement efforts and certainly just ongoing communications we do expect a mixed use development to be proposed at the site their intention is for it to be a by right development administrative approval the infrastructure only site plan is administrative approval so currently it's been reviewed once there are many outstanding comments that various departments have made the first phase that's described here with the 300 residential units and 100,000 square feet of commercial space that has not yet been proposed again that's just what's been discussed so there's probably a lot of potential variation for that and any subsequent pages that I've described here just trying to share with you the full context that staff asked of note the Macy site there is an approved site plan building at the location of about 100,000 square feet of office space there go ahead and next slide Chris here this is just a simplified version of the current site plan it's under review again it is a preliminary plan so it shows future pads to be subdivided it shows private streets to be constructed and it does show associated infrastructure curb gutter strongwaters some utility relocation what we've got circled here in red is what's shown to be demolished as a part of that site plan next slide here's the preliminary plan itself as you see there's no buildings proposed yet there's no uses proposed so it's really just a review of the road network the streets and the lots to ensure that they're compliant with the GDO development and that's really all I've got Chris you want to go back and leave that last slide up does anyone have any questions? Commissioner Baker Thanks for that Bo and thanks for providing the update I think it's important because this is such a central and such a major site in Durham just to get a quick update so that's good one thing that just stands out to me from this subdivision plat is what this is our site plan is that it's kind of facing away from the Northgate neighborhood or the wall town neighborhood sort of facing away from the existing community with sort of parking is a predominant feature of a site with a lot of potential for urbanizing urbanization and I know the wall town neighborhood has since seen this that we're looking at now and was very upset with the proposal that they have seen so I don't know where to go with that I know that this is sort of a by right kind of situation because we never like set it up otherwise we don't want to go on the property or put conditional zoning on the property or anything so now it's just kind of whatever whatever goes in CC but I wonder if I wonder if we might expect staff to scrutinize this proposal here and and that we might see some substantial or meaningful modifications that we're looking at right now sure yeah as you alluded to we're sort of bound to the regulations that are adopted in the UDO there may be some additional advisory comments that they may be provided but they would they would just be bound to the adopted regulations the what they've shown here of course creates the new lots proposed buildings would have max street yard setbacks but creating the new lot lines potentially finds that I'd have to review the code but that would be my expectation great Mr. Carmen Williams yeah I just had a question because there's been a lot of community back and forth in terms of what's going to go here is it going to be high rise buildings apartments or is it going to be makes use or like is it going to be like 555 Mangum so just have a question in terms of what exactly is the uproar about this particular parcel and what the problem is from the well not the problem but definitely the concerns as far as the community is concerned as is walltown presents it so what is the issue with this being proposed here because I don't think I've gotten a clear understanding and I know that there was a lot of back and forth between the developer and the current mayor about what was going on so can somebody just kind of give me a broad sense of what's supposed to be going here and what the the chatter is about it anyone not necessarily staff anyone who knows would be great I think they were mad said about lack of affordable housing I remember that being one of the big talking points between the mayor and the developer and the developer thinking about whose responsibility it was and they felt they didn't have any responsibility to provide any affordable housing whatsoever on their site and that that was the city's responsibility not clearly not understanding how low-income housing tax credit applications work so that was one of the big takeaways that I took from reading about the different disappointment or concerns from the community and from the current mayor okay I'll just be brief but the neighborhood has been organizing for about three years to you know sort of recognizing that there was going to be movement on this site and hoping for something, for hoping for some action and they put together a list of principals and they organized a lot and they did a lot of community engagement they engaged with over 600 people and so there's actually a lot online you know just like google lawtown north gate there's a couple couple sites with just tons of information for kind of organizing that they were doing so one element was affordable housing but there were certainly many other design and service and other types of issues that they were thinking about on the site okay I mean because I've been in Durham a long time and I've been in Durham since South Square was the best mall happening until north gate was built so I guess I'm just a little confused in terms of like why all of a sudden now we want to be concerned about affordable housing in a place that has become a burden and a blight in this particular area considering the fact that most of the people who live in this neighborhood they're well invested they're almost like the people who live in old farm and the people who live in forest hills so I was just a little confused in terms of what the issue was I definitely don't think that affordable housing should go on this site given the travel pattern that is around it with Gregson and Duke Street and the closeness to 85 do I think that there should be other shopping places that go here absolutely like a grocery store that's more formidable something besides the strip mall that's behind it but I might have to do my research and actually look into what exactly was being said by the community before I make a less informed discussion however I don't understand a whole lot when you've got Ninth Street less than two miles from this which is a jumping area like I love to go to Ninth Street I can walk to any different type of store or bar or restaurant and go to Harris teeter so I don't know again I just I'm lacking in knowledge with this but thank you very much Commissioner Baker and Commissioner Cameron and I will not prolong this anymore because I definitely like to go to sleep thanks guys so just a quick question we're not voting on anything but none of this is coming to us at all right that's correct okay thank you I have one brief question and then hopefully that will be all what are the possible pathways forward with this site and particularly I'm curious about two possibilities one does the fact that it's a site plan means it's set and done and we'll just continue on as a by right development or is there still a possibility for a rezoning at the site so the the site plan that they submitted would be under this zoning for sure and I know that their intention is to from my understanding from what they've communicated is that they would submit a site plan that's consistent with the existing zoning and that would be a right development now if there was any change from that there's a a great deal of flexibility in the CC zoning district in regards to the various uses that I had on the like 34 slide and all of those would be by right unless they were greater than 50 foot in height which I think was a topic that had come up previously but those uses would be permitted and so the Planning Commission and the City Council and Board of County Commissioners all have the right to initiate a rezoning if any of those bodies were to initiate a could any of those bodies initiate a rezoning for this parcel they could yes thank you does anybody have other comments they would like to add or questions they would like to add before we wrap up can I just qualify the yes anybody could sure the the state law has a limit on down zoning and that includes reducing increasing density and intensity and yes City Council could initiate that but I'm not quite sure Planning Commission could it would have to be from the governing body thank you Michael yep there are no further comments or questions I did want to just briefly have Michael provide a quick sentence of clarity on the requirements and the timing when those are due and how that's working it's been a while since we had a clear statement on it so I just wanted to make sure the entire commission is on the same page and thanks Beau for presenting yeah Michael would you just mind speaking to that briefly absolutely and I think you should have all received the recent sheets for the three cases that you heard tonight you will receive and we will actually take a look at those sheets and might tweak them but we would like you to fill those out if you have comments you can put the comments in those sheets or you can send comments separately to Terry Elliott and we do ask that you provide the comments within the weeks time period so by end of business day next Tuesday which will give you the weekend if you wanted to spend some time writing up some comments over the weekend I know how much you love all of thinking about planning commission stuff over the weekend but we really do need those comments in a timely manner if you so choose to provide comments so we can meet agenda deadlines moving forward so if you have any questions about providing comments you're more than welcome to reach out to us Grace, myself, whoever you feel comfortable reaching out to but that's where we are now we do ask for within the week so by the end of next Tuesday that would be great and if you know that you're going to provide them but you need that extra day maybe just give us heads up something happened on Wednesday just give us a heads up but we really would like them by that Tuesday end of big Tuesday so Mike we can put the comments directly in these forms I believe there's a space for that at the bottom of the form whatever works for you okay Mike how are these comments used to go to the city council absolutely there's an attachment for the city council or if it goes to the city council there's an attachment for the city council so we use the form so here's the form agenda which is the planning commissioners comments and we just list out all the comments as written by you we do not edit them at all it is as you have written them type boughs are included type boughs are included comment in a word doc or do you would you like to have answers in the form as well because I know there's some like yes no questions on there yes we'd like you to fill out the form whether you want to provide present provide the comments within the form or in a separate attachment that's up to you okay thank you that's helpful okay but that and no additional comments I will adjourn this meeting at 10 p.m. thank you all for sticking with us and for some great conversation thank you everybody