CITY OF CHARLOTTESVILLE
PLANNING COMMISSION WORKSESSION
TUESDAY, March 24, 2009 -- 5:00 P.M.
NDS CONFERENCE ROOM
Planning Commissioners
present:
Ms. Genevieve Keller (GK)
Mr. Bill Emory (BE)
Mr. Dan Rosensweig (DR)
Ms. Cheri Lewis (CL)
Mr. Michael Farruggio (MF)
Staff Present:
Ms. Missy Creasy (MC),
Planning Manager
Ms. Melissa Celii, Grants
Administrator
Mr. Brian Haluska (BH),
Neighborhood Planner
Mr. Nick Rogers, Neighborhood
Planner
Mr. Richard Harris (RH)
Deputy City Attorney
Citizens Present:
Ms. Victoria Dunham
Mr. Keith Lancaster
NOTE:
1--The following is a
transcript made by Bill Emory. Mr. Emory has significant hearing loss and
suffers from the associated challenges of effective language processing that
accompany this condition.
In the interests of
transparency and accuracy, please do not hesitate to email corrections to the
transcript to Mr. Emory at emory@billemory.com
2—Words which do not
add to the content of the narrative (Kind of, you know, so, well, that is
just, um, I mean, uh, things like that)
were not transcribed when used repeatedly.
3—When Emory doesn’t recognize a speaker he uses the initials, UI (unidentified). When the speech is garbled, ?? marks the spot..
MF (TRK 01) I am going to turn it over to Brian. Brian is going to give us an overview of about twenty minutes. What I’d like to do is, if we have a question in reference to the presentation let’s ask it. But if it is a more important question let’s hold it until the end of his presentation. This is scheduled for about twenty minutes, so, without further ado.
BH (00:00:17) I know when we had the public hearing I talked a little about zoning and the evolution of zoning so I wanted to start out with some things about the idea of zoning. Kind of a history lesson, a real brief history lesson to that. Zoning, really it evolved out of the idea of nuisance law, came out of the English colonies, came out of England in the 12th Century actually, evolution of it. And Common Law came across the Atlantic with…
MF (00:00:50) Dan, you haven’t missed anything, we are just getting started on the first part of…
BH …the
Colonists and was adopted by. Even with the written Constitution, Common Law,
the principles of Common Law, still apply, actually still apply today in the
American legal system.
In terms of nuisance, what nuisance laws really dealt with in early America, as you can see here was this, people obstructed roads, people obstructed waterways, things like that. It eventually evolved to being something where if somebody opened a gambling hall, somebody was running a brothel, or just using profanity apparently, if there weren’t expressed laws on the books they could use nuisance laws as a way of prosecuting that in early America. But as the industrial revolution came forward a lot of these nuisance laws began getting applied to things like pollution from these now heavy industries that had evolved in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. And consequently, a lot of localities found that nuisance law just wasn’t adequate to deal with this. (00:02:00)
You had industries filing torts against each other and
sorting it out in the courts system. It was just so difficult that they ended
up coming forth with a new form of land use regulation.
Zoning ordinances are actually less than one hundred years
old. They started in, the first one was written in 1916, it was written in New
York City. Some people say it was in response to this building actually. This
is the Equitable Building in Manhattan. It was the first building that really
was built right on the property line. As you can see, it was huge, a big change
from what, from the type of building projects they were used to seeing in New
York City. There was a lot of question about protection of sunlight, putting
other people in shadow and things like that. They started talking about ideas
like step-backs. This is actually where step-backs came from. And that is why
the Empire State Building is stepped back and why they went to the evolution of
plaza architecture which is what you saw with the World Trade Center where they
took a large piece of land and put the large towers, set in from the property
line. To ??? to that.
1926 was Euclid v Ambler which was the, Supreme Court upheld zoning as an acceptable use of the police power.
Early zoning, as I mentioned, focused on separating uses, keeping residential away from industrial and the Euclid v. Ambler case is where the name comes from for this type of zoning, Euclidean zoning, which is the separation of uses. So, that is where it comes from. Euclid is the village of Euclid, it is in Ohio. The Ambler was Ambler Realty.
Where we begin to see, 1961 was Jane Jacobs, The Death
and Life of Great American Cities, in
planning that is kind of the book that everyone looks up to, you’ve got to read
it if you are a planner, that is the way it works. But she began, she wrote
about where she grew up and what made the city that she grew up in successful,
and the street that she lived on successful. She mentioned a lot of things
about the fact that there were mixed use buildings in that area, there were a
lot of uses around there, people could walk to and from work. There were always
people in the neighborhood watching the streets. This brought up a lot of ideas
of suburban sprawl, and pushing the residential out of the central business
district. It’s pushing a lot of the vitality as well out of the central
business districts that, at 5:00 p.m., everybody would close up shop and leave
and you would have this ghost town in your central city. The City of Norfolk
was dealing with this, probably still dealing with it to a certain extent. If
you were in downtown Norfolk after 5:00 p.m. ten years ago, there was nobody,
nobody there.
The lack of eyes on the street, this is the idea that people that live in their neighborhood keep track of things, they keep eyes on, they are looking at other peoples’ children. If they are messing around they are out there scolding them. A report will get back to your parents before you even get home.
By separating that out, by separating the uses out, you
create an area where people are, crime can thrive because nobody is out there
watching the street. This brings up the current theory which stresses putting
uses together. One reason is to minimize dependence on the automobile and also
higher density which tries to halt the leapfrog effect that we see where people
move out to the suburbs chasing larger plots of land, larger houses and the
commercial and retail follow the customers out there and you keep on going
further and further out into the suburbs. City abandonment, where the services
already are.
So, how does the Comprehensive Plan fit into our idea of zoning? Well, simply put, we always said, the Comprehensive Plan is a guide, but to be a little more complex, it is the vision of the community, what they want to see in the future basically, over a period of time.
Communities do different lengths, obviously in Virginia we are required to review it every five years. Many communities focus on a twenty-five year time frame, some do fifty. There was a movement for a while in planning to look at one hundred year plans, how the community would evolve over three generations.
If you read the Code, the Code of Virginia, one of the big portions of the comprehensive plans is future capital improvement. Where you are going to put your new roads, where you are going to put your new parks and schools so that as your community grows you know generally what you are going to have so that you can plan for them and you are not caught in this situation where you have inadequate services.
Other items that we talk about a lot, we see demographics in ours, traffic is an extra big part of this and also, the future land uses of how your city is going to grow. So this brings up the land use map. It is not required in a comprehensive plan but it is a, it is commonly used in most comprehensive plans as a way of showing graphically what the community intends to locate where, what uses they want in what spots.
The thing to stress here, the map is also a guide like the comprehensive plan, it is not set in stone like “this is where things happen”, it is a vision for how things will move in the future. Like I pointed out in the past, the map is one of several factors used to evaluate rezoning applications. If you look at the standard of review for rezoning applications the comprehensive plan designation is one thing, but historic situation is another, are there other historic resources in the area? What is the current set-up of the property? What is the adjacent property like? There are a lot of reasons, a lot of factors that go into evaluating this application. Some communities tie it very strictly like I mentioned, in some, the comprehensive plan land use map is it. In Charlottesville that is not the case. It really varies from city, from locality to locality as to how strong of a link they make between this particular part of their comp plan and how they carry out the day to day applications that they get for the land use in the locality.
MF
(00:08:30) Can I ask you a question? Are you going to touch on zoning maps
versus land use maps?
BH This bring up the question of the consistency, we talked about zoning ordinances and how the comprehensive plan works. Generally speaking, good planning practice says that you once you review your comprehensive plan you then are reviewing your zoning ordinance, you are reviewing all of your ordinances for things that are making sure they are consistent, that the vision you are presenting to the public is consistently reflected through all of you ordinances.
There are some pros and cons to this though. The pros are obvious that it is a very strong link and it is very easy to follow. If you are a member of the public and you review the comprehensive plan you see statements of intent. And then you go to the ordinances and you see those same intents carried out- that is a very strong statement that you put forward.
The other thing though is that a comprehensive plan on a twenty five year timeline, if you are reviewing it every five years, you are constantly bumping it forward so the comprehensive plan is, in many cases, not what is actually going on at present.
The thing that I usually like to throw out there. You know
we can show an area, we eventually want to have a neighborhood scale mixed-used
zone in the City. Well, if none of those businesses are there and someone comes
in and says “I’ve seen in the Comprehensive Plan that you are planning for
this to be here, I’d like to rezone my property to allow mixed use.”
There may be a decision that the infrastructure is not there
right now, it will be in the future, but at this point we’re not looking for
that to be located at the present. Twenty-five years from now that may be
apartments, may be a place where that happens. So there is some pros and cons
with having it strictly consistent or more generally consistent.
We come to comprehensive plan amendments. The staff opinion is that, what I think generally among staff is that these are very very rare or they should be very very rare and should be in several very limited number of situations. So if it is error of omission, an error, something getting in that was wrong. Something like that then obviously needs to be corrected. We have the new Census, we’ve updated the Comprehensive Plan to reflect the new census data, that is probably a pretty important thing especially if the Census data gives you an idea that you are growing, what the trends are, and you want to put that type of information out to the public.
Generally speaking though, there aren’t many land-use issues that require a comprehensive plan amendment where the zoning ordinance and the zoning map can’t handle it better. That is the nuts and bolts, the zoning ordinance and the map are the nuts and bolts of what gets built where and what the envelope is and almost all land use issues that come up in the City can be dealt with through those two documents.
One note that I’ll reflect on later here, the Comprehensive Plan, because we do it every five years, there is supposed to be a comprehensive review process every five years, if you are updating it in the middle of that five year period it kind of begins to cast some doubt on the process you did before and obviously when you have a two hundred page document there will be errors here and there, it is almost impossible to catch them all. If you are suddenly making shifts in land use policy between those five year review periods, it brings up a question of “what has changed what is so different from the last time you reviewed it?” That is a question to keep in the back of your mind whenever you see a comprehensive plan amendment.
DR (00:12:33) Can I stop you for a second? I’d love for you to elaborate a little more on that last bullet point. Why is it that there are few land use issues requiring a comprehensive plan amendment that can’t be dealt with in the zoning ordinance? What if there is a shift, and we have regularly scheduled updates of the comp plan, every five years. It seems to me, events happen, oil surges to $100 a barrel or something like that, which makes the Comprehensive Plan written in 2000 in some ways irrelevant in terms of land use. Why wouldn’t you deal with that in that comp plan?
BH For one thing, I am talking specific to Charlottesville. I could see if you had a very large rural community where you are looking for an eventual… your comprehensive
plan says “we want to either restrict growth or we want to have eventual we have growth areas that we expect people to grow into” and something like that changes everything like that you may want to consider it. I think the idea of the five year review was more put in there so that you, it forces you to take a look at it.
But in terms of long-term general planning, I think the five year, doing updates less frequently than five years, is kind of silly. What I am saying here is that most of the land-use issues that we get regarding accessory units, regarding the types of things we are dealing with, tree canopy… There are regulations in the zoning ordinance that can be amended within the guidance of the comp plan to deal with those issues on a day to day basis.
If you are dealing with, comprehensive plan, when I think of comprehensive plan, something that rises to that level it’s, possibly, a large industry that provides most of your tax base, leaving town. The decision that comes up there, that may require you to do some planning, some long-term planning about how your community is going to survive. But in the smaller sense, when we deal with Charlottesville, an area that is kind of built out, that is dependent mostly on a lot of our jobs come from the University. The University is not contemplating moving at any time. It is a fairly stable situation, it is hard to imagine some sort of issue that comes up that requires this dramatic of a planning process.
We have already talked about the current comp plan has sentences in it about Martha Jefferson, that is probably the largest land-use situation that will be coming up in the next couple of years. We already have guidance in or comp plan dealing with that. The process that deals with Martha Jefferson can now be handled in the zoning ordinance, what comes forward, the zoning ordinance and all of that, will handle it.
Other communities that have a very strict tie between their comprehensive plan and their land-use map, like Albemarle County, they want you to go and amend the comp plan before you do a project like Martha Jefferson. They want to amend that land use map to show whatever you are going to do, then get your rezoning, then do your site plan. We generally don’t do that, we never do that. This is specific to Charlottesville. There are communities that do it a different way, but that is generally the way we see it.
GK (00:15:45) But that is just the way we have done it, there is nothing to preclude us from doing it another way. Right? I am not disagreeing with you, I am just asking.
MC Making a statement.
BH I think you could, the issue is you have to basically one, revise the standard of review in the rezoning. This would have to be something that there would have to be some political will to do at the City Council level. It’s saying, from now on rezonings are going to be comp planned and if you are not, if it is not agreeable to the comp plan then you can’t do it and you have to propose an amendment to the comp plan.
MC (00:16:14) And the City over time has taken pride in being proactive in that planning aspect as opposed to having developers come in and provide…
BH …propose the changes
MC …what the change is going to be. The City has taken on that task as opposed to in Albemarle County the developer proposes what change they want and then it is accepted or not accepted whereas the City spends the time in focusing on where the City wants to see it go as a whole so that that is already taken care of, theoretically. So that when the developer comes in, here is the vision for where the City wants to go long term and how do they fit within the vision.
DR more proactive versus reactive?
BH That’s some way, and the other thing is the reality of Charlottesville as a landlocked City. We are not annexing at any point because of the General Assembly and the revenue sharing agreement. All of our, most of our development is going to be infill on the few large parcels there are left and increases in density like we are seeing just south of downtown where people are putting up larger buildings on spaces where there were smaller buildings or no buildings at all. That type of stuff, you want to set guidelines in your comprehensive plan that “we are planning to increase density in our urban core” and then you want to have your zoning ordinance reflect that, you want to set up that framework to encourage people to take advantage of it.
If you are in a rural area you are probably trying to control growth, you want to almost set up boundaries and obstacles for people to get, to have to deal with, to take those greenfields and turn them into subdivisions or something like that.
BE (00:17:50) Talking about thinking ahead, I think it is great that the City plans ahead. The reason why I was hoping we could refer this to a committee and bring back some recommendations for the long term, in terms of looking at the land use map as a precursor for zoning changes, is best expressed, a wonderful case, would be Grove Square. A little piece of grey that was intermingled with residential so you have an eighty-five foot tall building with sixteen foot appurtenance on top, nine hundred and twenty eight car parking lot on a residential street, split zoning, all sorts of problems that if we had been doing our planning job, if we had gone ahead and just looked at the land-use plan map and said “these grey areas where they are overlaid in residential neighborhoods, we need to look at these” and begin to think about other alternatives like neighborhood commercial or mixed use zones so we don’t have another garage, or whatever a developer… It is a wonderful project but…
MF I tend to agree with you and I think that is a great example of something that we could look at, but what I’d like to do is to get through this first. That is exactly what we are going to move into next but I’d like to get this done.
BE Excuse me.
MF No
no that is all right.
BH So this is an idea, this is a general idea of what a land use map amendment process would take into account. By the way, you don’t have to take too many notes because I have got a memo that has all this stuff in it, I just wanted to get through the presentation and then we’ll have that to go.
GK Could you just send us a Powerpoint as an attached file?
BH Sure, I can do that. This would be the identification of the areas, this was done in 2006 when the Neighborhood Plans were updated as a part of the Comprehensive Plan review. The section that we, that you recommended for approval to be, of the Comprehensive Plan, that you recommended to be amended, that sentence that was struck, that section of the code, of the plan, areas that were identified, Fry’s Spring area
was identified for the question of rental housing and students in the Fry’s Spring area. Rose Hill was an area where there is industrial zoned property next to residential property. Questions about the Cherry Avenue Corridor, all of those are in there listed as land use issues. So, this stuff was primarily done, if you were going to go back and do an entire land use map revision, you would probably want to verify that. It has been three years. You’d probably want to go back and look at those issues and say “are these still pressing matters? Is there still a political will behind moving forward on these things?”
At that point you want to start studying, gathering all the information you have out there, try to quantify the problem for people to review and get an idea, create some possible scenarios that you want to look at. You are going to have to engage stakeholders. There are probably going to be several meetings spent doing this.
With every one of those land use issues there are two sides.
There are landowners that have a particular zoning on their property that
probably want to maintain it and you have neighbors that find those uses, uses
permitted on that land, objectionable. Both of those groups are stakeholders,
both of those have a spot at the table and you are going to want to get input
from that before moving forward from both of them and see what areas there are
possibly for middle ground, middle ground, there are areas for compromise. From
that you would draft a proposed revision, obviously you’d have to go through a
public hearing like the last one we did and eventually it would move forward to
adoption from there.
Some of the issues that we want to make you aware of when we talk about the land-use map and amending it. One is that each one of those areas that we talked about that are mentioned in the Comprehensive Plan would probably require multiple neighborhood meetings to sort through. You have the trying to get an idea of what the problem is from the people involved in it. You have the bringing the information back to them, getting their input, you probably have to do that several times as you work through these issues, and also the presentation of the plan to make sure that if everyone doesn’t love it at least they can tolerate it, get some sense. If everyone in the neighborhood gets up and speaks against it at the public hearing it is probably not going any further, that revision isn’t going any further and you’ve wasted a bunch of time.
The plan must be realistic. What I mean by this, with land use decisions there is a lot of, there needs to be a sense of “are we going to effect the change we are looking for?” If we took the Downtown Mall for example, just to be totally crazy, we took the Downtown Mall and said “we want to do low density residential here” and we rezoned that land all to low-density residential, show that in the Comprehensive Plan, change all the zoning. Well, a hundred years could pass and the area would still be the way it is now because we are (???) non-conforming statutes in Virginia.
You need to look at how you are going… this is the problem with down-zoning, because people hold on to those non-conforming uses and they pass on for generations of time before they actually go out of existence. It is a very slow process to change down. If you are looking to redevelop an area usually you have to give somebody an incentive to redevelop. You have got to give something that makes the land more valuable to a developer than it is to the owner in some way.
What has changed since 2007? What has given rise to the need to do this now versus in twelve to twenty-four months when this plan comes back up for review again as required by City Code?
So, this is just a refresher of the current priorities of
the Planning Commission. We can go back to this as we plot this out. The
questions to resolve that we’ve got, and this is the first one…
MF (00:24:09) Before you go into these questions, and I am going to go through it as well, you didn’t touch on, unless you did and I missed it, the zoning map and how it relates to the land use map.
BH It goes back to the consistency of it
MF Are they different?
BH Yea, it is different.
MF The zoning map is actually the law like the zoning ordinances whereas the land use map is what is currently…
BH In the Comprehensive Plan, envisioned.
MF So the zoning map has more teeth than the land use map?
BH Yes, the zoning map is the legal regulations. To get back to the idea of the realistic thing that I mentioned but also about consistency. When I first had my first real land use planning job in Waynesboro they sent me home with a copy of the comp plan and said “read up on this before you come to work here.” I read through it and one thing they had done with their comprehensive plan, that I got the story on, was when they’d last reviewed it they had formed two citizens committees from people that were interested, and one of them just worked on the land use map.
They basically colored the land use map how they thought and they had taken every vacant parcel that they could find and colored it green for open space, including an entire stretch of open land on Lew DeWitt Boulevard, which, if you know Lew DeWitt Boulevard in Waynesboro it was built for commercial development, that is the whole purpose of that project was to create a commercial corridor where they could get commercial businesses.
That map, with all that shown as open space, went into the comprehensive plan, got passed, it got put on a shelf and they never did anything with it, the zoning map stayed the way it was because no one really wanted to acknowledge that. That is not really fair to the people that worked on it. Obviously, they created something that should have been dealt with at the comprehensive plan level. But, a comprehensive plan showing all this open space. When people come in with a piece of the land there, they are looking at the zoning map, “what is the zoning?” They go to the zoning ordinance, they are looking at the regulations, that is what they abide by. Somebody could say “hey, our Comprehensive Plan says this ought to be open space” but that is not going to win.
MC One of many factors.
MF If there is any other example that Bill has that he wants to elaborate on before we go into these questions…
CL Is
that the end of your of your presentation? You have more?
BH This is the last slide, just a couple of more lines…
MF A couple of questions, is all you have, if you want to put them up we can look at them.
BH Do you do it in advance or do you do it with the next comprehensive plan update? And how do you shuffle the priorities? Is there one that you want to de-emphasize to bring this to the forefront? That is really the point that I had. The thing that I would tag on to Bill’s example of Grove Square is we looked at that project and we said “gosh we really wish that industrial zoning hadn’t been there.”
There was a conscious decision at one point to keep that zoning the way it was. The Cherry Avenue Corridor, the bulk of the zoning around the railroad tracks in the City for a long time has been industrially zoned properties and that is one of the reasons that Walker Square and that whole stretch in there and all the way down to Cherry Avenue, when they took a look at that they made the Cherry Avenue Corridor, they spoke specifically about that parking lot. It was industrially zoned at the time, the neighborhood obviously wanted it R1s, there was a decision made, at the City Council level or the Planning Commission level, I don’t know where, but there was a decision made “we’re not going to touch it because it doesn’t really relate to Cherry Avenue but we don’t want to drop the zoning on this because we are afraid we’ll get sued.” That was, there was a decision made by the City to leave it the way it was and this shows what happens sometimes instead of dealing with the problem head-on if you sweep it under the rug.
(00:27:50)
MF That was a time when we didn’t have, if I remember correctly, we didn’t have a full time traffic engineer.
BH I wouldn’t know
MF …planning issues with traffic alone we should have changed everything about this development…
BE I think risk management is definitely important, Richard (Harris) is here, he would agree with me on that. I also think that some of the zoning, the zoning (the use) in the City if you went back and did a history of it, some of it has been there for a hundred years. Like the Young Bark Extract Plant on the south side of the CSX tracks in east Belmont-Carlton.
Some of it was placed in various areas of the City possibly because the people didn’t have any socio-economic clout or they were racial groups. There is a lot of Federal Code about this. So, at the table we have the owners of the land, we have got the neighbors, but we also have also got wisdom that we have learned about well “hey, we did some race and class based zoning back in the fifties that we need to begin to send back.”
Bill Lucy would talk about, we are moving away from Euclidean and there are actually better uses, uses that would be better for the City financially of some of the M1 land that, in the old way of thinking are down-zonings. Mixed use with some neighborhood and some neighborhood commercial, back to Jane Jacobs, neighborhood commercial that fits the scale of the neighborhood, not vast warehouses, but little bodegas and shoe-stores and stuff like that.
But, we need to move ahead. The grey is all over the yellow, all over town, and, if you go back and look at how a lot of it got there, the way it got there was not through a process that we would admire today.
MC I think some of the evolution of zoning in the last couple of years or so is recognizing that. Industrial uses, when it was M1 and M2, were the serious high
industrial type uses, not just gas stations (???) and those kinds of things. If you look at what is allowed in the Industrial areas now it is a lot more downgraded to the light industrial less nuisance oriented. Now, we have a lot that is still out there, they are not, maybe not going anywhere anytime soon but down the line there may be that potential. It is a long term kind of thing.
MF And also to be fair, because it hasn’t come up in the conversation. I don’t disagree with what you are saying Bill about some of the racial or socio-economic ignorance that allowed this to happen but a lot of it was because it was on rail lines. Forty or fifty years ago, that was how everything moved because the roads, the infrastructure, wasn’t there.
BE I can only talk about the things I know. There has never been a siding on the north side of the CSX tracks in this whole area.
MF There has never been a what?
BE A railroad siding, it has never been used that way.
MF What do you mean by a railroad siding.
CL A way to get on.
BE When you are using the railroad, and you build an industry next to it you have to have a little spur line.
MF And there has never been one there? You know that for a fact?
CL You mean on the City side is what you are saying?
BE On the north side of the CSX tracks here.
MC Well, railroads and waterways were treated very very differently than they are looked at today.
BE Also, I will point out that there were railroads all up through this neighborhood here and railroads all down through this neighborhood here. Again, just go back and look at the economics.
MF I know that in this area here, between Preston and this is country and this is city, there are lots of sidetracks all through here.
BE Right. But again though, the City’s urban planner recommended not intermingling residential and industrial back in the fifties and suggested putting the stuff north. For whatever reason, we do not really know, it is lost in the mists of time.
MC And a lot of that in the Northern sector is stuff that was annexed in over time too so that factors in.
MF The same rationale for having things closer to the people and close to the public commerce applied back then as they do now. But I think Missy’s point is very well taken that we are making some changes to that and we are adjusting it. I think we could probably come up with another five or six examples. But, the big thing before us tonight that we’ve got to decide on is number one, is do we want to update the land-use map?
I am going to say that probably it is going to be one of our priorities that we do want to do because it has been brought up to the front again and I think that most of us do recognize it is something that we need to look at. So, if the answer to that is yes, the next question is going to be when. We have twenty five more minutes to discuss this to try to stay on schedule and that is what I think we need to wrestle with, do we want to take something off of our priority…
Do we want to change one of our priorities or do we want to plan, as the Planning Commission, to tackle this in six months, twelve months or eigthteen months?
BE Lets plan to tackle it and lets move on to the next thing.
MF Do we all want to tackle this? Is there anybody that does not want to address this issue?
CL I thought we were going to talk about Woolen Mills and industrial uses at this work-session, I must have been at completely a different meeting than other people where we said “yeah lets do the work session time… (???)
UI To get expanded
MF What we are planning on doing is pursuing that but we can sit here for thirty minutes and discuss Woolen Mills. But we are going to be delving into, this is what Missy and I discussed earlier.
CL I thought that was what we agreed to do.
BE It got changed
MF I wouldn’t say it so much got changed, it is a heady topic..
CL I didn’t make the agenda so.
MF …that we can’t address it and fix the problem here in the next hour. Do we want to proceed with making a change to the land use map?
CL I thought we were going to talk about industrial uses next to residential uses and what we wanted to do with current M1 properties at this work session. Did you make the agenda? (00:34:27)
MF No…
CL Or did Mr.Pearson?
MF Um-um
CL Or Ms. Creasy? You did?
MC Yes.
RH It came from when this request was before everybody. And in order to look at one part…
CL Then why is it different than what we agreed to at our meeting?
RH That is what I am trying to say. At our last meeting (???) Brian explained that in order to look at updates to the land use map it is more appropriately done in a comprehensive manner not just one portion of the land use map because it does affect the entire City. So that…
CL OK so, the presentation is basically to tell us “don’t do this” is that?
RH Or what it entails.
BH …no, what it entails.
MF Bill gave an example of Grove Square and he pointed out some of the problems that went into that. I think we are pretty familiar with the one down in Woolen Mills and if we want to discuss that a little bit to show how much of a problem that is…
CL I thought that was what we were going to do during this work session.
MC You guys as a group can’t fairly take on one of the land use issues that has been identified without having a plan of action for working through the land use plans that have already been identified in the Comprehensive Plan. You already got ten or twelve items in the Comprehensive Plan that are identified land use issues and there needs to be a plan in action so when somebody from Ridge Street says ‘well why aren’t you dealing with us, you are just working with Woolen Mills” we can say “well, ok, this is the plan of action to move forward through this and this is where you are going to come up in this rotation.” It is not that we aren’t going to go there it is that we need to do it broader so that we can have more acceptance of the system.
CL I thought this was an issue, as identified at our meeting Tuesday, that covers a lot of different neighborhoods.
MC Well, it does
CL I got an email today from North Downtown…
BE In fairness to Ms. Dunham and her original letter to us it mentioned the other neighborhoods where this same intermingling was the issue. It is a tremendous issue when someone can build an eighty-five foot tall building next to your house with no set back…
MC Which is true, But some of our preliminary thought is then that there are a number of neighborhoods where industrial uses have been of concern and so that would logically make sense and so that comes to the forefront as one of the first issues to work with the neighborhoods that are having that concern. But we also want to make, we want to make this very very visual for everyone, we want to make it fair to say “oh, we are not just working with the Woolen Mills and we are going to ignore everyone else”. We have got a process for focusing through.
CL But I never, could you keep Woolen Mills out of it? I never said it should be neighborhood specific, that is totally not what we are saying but I thought we were discussing it and I brought this list that you sent me about three years ago. That lists properties that are in M1 that the current uses are inconsistent. I thought that’s what we were talking about but now, it’s forty minutes into it and…
GK You are probably the only one of us that has this list.
BE How does one get on that list?
CL I ran it by Missy because I was curious about it when Grove Square came up. Frankly, the properties at Grove Square, that person acquired those properties knowing it had M1 zoning and he knew that he could do damn well what he pleased there. That was the… it was a minefield for him, it was great, it was beautiful, oilfield rather. That is why he acquired them, I don’t think it was, maybe at some point officials in the City knew that there was a larger plan. Richard Hewitt’s plan for these properties where Grove Square went is a decade old. It has been talked about since I came on the Planning Commission (6/13/2000). I don’t think that was a big surprise.
I think if we continue to allow things to be zoned M1 but we have staffers like Brian who come to meetings and say “well M1 really isn’t M1 anymore, it’s different types of business”, then those should not be M1 anymore (???). If the use of the property for the last fifty years has never been M1, why are they still zoned for light industrial?
BH There was a large change in the way that the zoning ordinance was written in 2003.
CL Absolutely.
BH Yeah. The prior ordinance was what you call an incremental ordinance which is, your lowest intensity zoning is listed first, there is a list of uses. Then, your next lowest intensity is listed next and it is “these uses plus whatever was in the last one.”
When you through that style of ordinance, by the time you get to M2, or whatever your highest intensity zoning is, M2 allows everything.
Nick and I always joke about this because the Waynesboro ordinance was written like this and it was M2 which basically said “you can do everything but” and then the next section was just hilarious list of uses that you could not do in the City, they were just the banned uses. There were only like fifteen, explosives manufacture, atomic power plant and things that nobody would ever locate in a city. That was the way it was done.
In 2003, when the ordinance was changed, M2 was stricken out of the code. There is actually, M1 doesn’t exist anymore, its actually MI…
MC MI
BH …Manufacturing and Industrial is the zone. There was a very narrow list. I tell people that in 2003, the Industrial zone went from the most permissive to one of the least permissive zones overnight pretty much. 2003, MI zoning allowed for very a very small group of light industrial uses. Heavy industrial is gone.
There are still heavy industrial uses, they are all non-conforming, if they shut done tomorrow they are gone.
CL …Which is what we want. I would even argue that we don’t want a whole lot of M1 or MI, light industrial…
GK I am not sure that I agree with you.
MC Well that is a mix too, do we really want that? Allied Concrete is one of the largest tax base locations for the City, that and Barracks Road Shopping Center, they are both up there together. That is huge, that would be a huge change to the City if that was gone.
CL I don’t think that it should be gone from the City, its location is not…
GK Where would you move it?
CL River Road.
MF Who is going to pay to move a plant like that?
CL Lets talk about putting all our industrial uses in one part of the City.
GK Yeah, but that is not exactly…
CL If we want to be a dense, and urbane and urban city why do we have…
MF Where did you say? What was the location?
CL River Road. That is where I think…
MC By the river.
BE Greenbrier Park…
GK But aren’t we trying to enhance the river?
CL Pardon me?
GK But aren’t we trying to enhance the river environment?
BE …that is my favorite
CL There are places along River Road that are not along the river.
GK It would have made more sense to put it there in the first place because you’d have sand and water but they didn’t locate there for some reason.
DR Can I interrupt for just a second?
MF Yeah, Dan?
DR I
think we should actually deal with the questions that are in front of us
because they might bring us right back to this conversation but I think that
they are reasonable questions to ask. It very well might be that we decide
“lets start the conversation right now.”
CL Can I ask Brian a question on the first one?
UI Sure.
CL If the land use map is supposed to be the comprehensive plan…
BH (?) Support for that
CL …how different is the land use map from our zoning map currently? Are there enough inconsistencies that you guys become aware of them a lot or that we should be aware like we should take official notice “yeah, there is kind of a gap there” or is it pretty tight?
BH I think it is pretty close. There are some, there are a couple of issues that come up. One is, you see a lot of grey on there in areas that have since been zoned mixed use, the Ix property, a lot of areas below there. The mixed-use area would obviously have to expand to capture a lot of those.
There are some parcels that are inconsistent. The zoning is one, the land use map says another, Cherry Avenue is one of them. There are areas where you can make that change.
The question that I think it raises, there are a couple of questions it raises. One is, because something is designated on a land-use map as a particular use, the zoning ordinance is going to be more specific. We may say, you can say mixed use on a land-use map and the uses permitted under that, the land-use designation in the comp plan, could be considered residential in the zoning ordinance, it could be considered commercial, it could be considered under one of our mixed use categories, in some cases it might even be considered industrial.
The zoning ordinance is going to be very specific about what uses are out there. This is a very broad guideline for things, we generally want business here, generally want mixed use here. You don’t want to break it down and have as many categories here as you have in the zoning ordinance. That defeats the purpose of it.
MC For actual applications I can only think of a handful over the last couple of years where there has been a difference between what someone has been applying for and what the land-use map has said. That is just applications, that isn’t properties that have come forward. That hasn’t been of issue, the map itself.
CL ???
BH Down in the Woolen Mills area you will notice, if you look at the zoning map versus the land use map, that the grey portions, the grey areas on the land-use map are larger. There are parcels that are designated as industrial on the land-use map that are zoned residential on…
BE Currently residential
BH …the zoning. Now does that mean that somebody could come in tomorrow and say “I want to do an industrial use on my property.” They could ask. But like I said, the land-use map is one consideration. If everything on that road, East Market Street, is residentially developed, you could have a very strong case to turn a rezoning down in that area and not permit that use because the impact on the adjacent properties.
UI Even it is supported by…
BH Even if the land-use map supports it. There are other considerations out there whereby you can turn it down. And I venture to say, if it is surrounded by low density residential, I don’t think a planner is going to come forward and recommend approval in that situation. They are going to say, “you have got a low density residential area here, you need to stay that way, it is going to stay that way.”
BE A land-use map that is a couple of years ahead of the zoning map would be a tremendous tool for us. When we are presented with a rezoning request, we can say, it would be a tremendous tool if a lot of thought went into it, developing it. We could, in the face of a rezoning request say “well, we have talked about that a lot and our land-use map, we don’t perceive this part of the City developing that way, we have gotten a lot of input from citizens and thank you for bringing your rezoning request but we find the current zoning is adequate.”
MF We can do that whenever we want to
MC ???
BE A land use map helps us see into the…
MF-MC (00:45:36) ???
MF Go ahead.
MC Many of these land use issues that have come up have been under discussion and for whatever reason that discussion has been dropped. So, it has been talked about, it just hasn’t moved forward to a next step. For instance, with the Woolen Mills case, we found minutes from meetings where it has been discussed but there hasn’t been a next step. Perhaps that…
BE I am so glad you raised the minutes. The minutes from that meeting left out Mr. Farruggio’s statement which called on the mayor and the assembled people to continue study, it just wasn’t in the minutes. It’s in the…
MF Let’s separate the minutes issue because I agree with you on your point but, we have already spent ten to fifteen minutes discussing the fact that we want to discuss this.
I would like to ask…
CL No, I actually asked Brian a question and I think it was getting pretty well answered, I think it was well answered.
GK I have a question I’d like to ask.
MF The answer to question number one (slide 14), is it yes unanimously?
GK I wanted to ask a question prior to answering that question.
MF Go ahead.
GK Could staff outline to us the process we would need to do this update?
BH That was the…
MF That was the whole slide show
GK That was the whole slide show
BH This is the original draft, this is kind of the process that we envision.
GK And a calendar of how we would go about this?
MC It would be a couple of year process.
BH Yeah. We mentioned when we were doing the priority setting process with you, the four priorities that we brought up and discussed in a work session. One of the things that I think I presented was about the consistency between the Comp Plan and the Zoning Ordinance. Not just on the land-use map, but taking the whole comp plan, all the goals, looking at the zoning ordinance, seeing where there were incompatibility and fixing that. One of the things I called out was, we’d have to evaluate all those issues, give them to you, and have you prioritize those because some of them could be very easy fixes in the zoning ordinance where you tweak a sentence or two and fix the issue and others could be like the land use map which was the exact example that I brought up which could take two years to do because there is so much public input you want to do here. You want to set something up that you are not tweaking every year or two. You want to have something that a lot of people know, had their input, maybe they don’t agree with what you have done but they agree that they were heard in that process. It is a big document. It is on par with the comprehensive plan in terms of how you are going to do it because it represents so much, because it is brought up at every rezoning, it is a map that people look at very easily and it is probably one of the most read pages in that plan.
(00:48:20)
DR Is the process, the five year process for updating the Comprehensive Plan a two year, what is the time-frame?
BH (??) …two and a half, two
UI
DR It’s a two year process.
CL The first time I went through it was a one year process, but last time, our (??) city had changed so much.
DR That speaks to the heart of the three questions[1] that Brian asked at the end of his presentation. If this is a two year process, or if this is a process that is longer than the process to update the Comprehensive Plan, well then we have, and if we agree that we want to update the Comprehensive Plan as regularly scheduled every five years then we have to get started on this thing earlier, if this takes longer to do. Right? In order to time them.
CL When had you thought we would do it
MC With the Comprehensive Plan you guys would have to determine how extensive an update would be needed. The transportation chapter had a consultant and a lot of meetings on it. Maybe, in five years things haven’t changed so much and maybe that isn’t as big a focus. There has been discussion already that we want to spend some time on putting a chapter together that focuses on the river. That is a pretty big endeavor there. But maybe some of the other items won’t be quite as big of an update. A lot of comprehensive plan updates, they range everything from somebody taking it down, looking at it and saying “yep, it is o.k.” putting a new cover on, to the reviews that we typically do. As part of that, the land-use map could be one of the top five things that are focused on during that review. There are a lot of options.
BH It is good to review, it just says you have to review it every (trk06) five years, it doesn’t say you have to re-write it or anything like that. Just in our speaking, it is because we are literally around the corner from doing this again. In planning terms, we are going to be looking at this, it says 2007, that is 2012, next year is 2010, we are already starting to lay the ground work. We were doing, March of 2005 we were doing, we were starting to do preliminary meetings to lead up to the comprehensive plan review process.
My sense of it is, when you look at the land use map, the one thing that you really ought to be looking for, rather than the consistency between our zoning and our land use map is, what areas on there are designated in a manner than you feel is inappropriate for that area. Are the Industrial areas, should we are they, in twenty five years do we want to see industrial completely out of the City? My recollection of the 2006 meeting was that there were several members of City Council that felt that industrial had a big part of the City’s economy.
CL I am not arguing that. I just would have it arranged differently and encouraged differently.
BH That would be something that we could… there are going to need to be some changes, there are going to be some issues that result in that map being changed. For whatever reason the map isn’t right, then that would be, I think the way I envision it, that would be the top priority when the comprehensive plan comes back up for review. That is the thing that we will be starting those preliminary meetings on in twelve months or so because we know this item needs to come forward. It needs to be different than what we have got. It has been, it will have been ten years since we have done it at that point, this is a 2001 document. (00:51:53)
MC This is in a way a (??) review theme, a comp plan theme to it, a focus area. Last time we had an environmental focus, we had some transportation focus. There was a group doing that part. Some of the other boring regular stuff was going on along the way. But, there is usually a focus and it would make sense for this to be the focus since it has been awhile.
MF Does everybody feel as if we can move forward and have this done?
CL Do you mean now?
UI ???
CL Could you put the questions up again? Personally, I think we do need to update it at sometime, but I’d rather it be done with the comp plan process because it just seems hand in hand. And if you have to solicit, you want to solicit, neighborhood input, and stakeholder input and everything else then I think it needs to be publicized and published in the same way that the comp plan does. It would seem like if we would start this process now, we would have to do the same thing again for some of the same issues maybe with the comp plan.
BH That is true. If you do a Comprehensive Plan amendment, anything that, one of the things that happens it seems is that things that are fresh in peoples minds will come back up. If you are doing it that quickly behind, one on top of the other. That is why my personal preference in terms of a staff member is have that be a part of the next Comprehensive plan amendment.
The other thing I’d like to point out is, the land-use decisions that are being made today are based on our zoning ordinance. If there is improper zoning, that is a very, that is something that can be fixed. That is something that can be done. A down-zoning has to be comprehensive in nature but if there is issues with regulations, the thing that we noticed about the eighty-five, the parking garages, that is a zoning ordinance issue, that is something that is allowed in an industrial zone that maybe shouldn’t be allowed in an industrial zone.
MF It takes a lot of courage on Planning Commissioners’ part and on City Council’s part to defend a decision that is going to be different than what the zoning ordinance says and we have to be prepared for that and speak up to it. That is on us.
BH The other thing that I would mention to the Commission is that if you update that land use map, and go back to my Waynesboro example, once that goes into the comprehensive plan, the next step, and arguably the tougher step…
BE …changing the zoning.
BH …changing the zoning map to reflect what you’ve got out there.
BE It is sort of like floating a trial balloon
MF That is a good analogy (??)
RH Floating what?
BE Trial balloon. Put it out there, see whether you are going to have a real problem. The City was waiting for the big lawsuit to show up when they down-zoned from R2 to R1A back in the nineties and it just never happened because the owners still retained value. They still had a way where they saw their value there.
CL We just have this type of balloon in the South, you’ve never seen one of those in the North.
RH I had never heard of that.
MF Dan, what do you think?
DR Unequivocal yes to bullet point one[2] I am kind of divided about two, I do think it, all along I have thought that staff was right to say it should be part of the comprehensive plan update process. In learning more about how long it will take and our need to balance other, there are other things that are going to be on the table for updating during the comprehensive plan process, I am a little worried that there will be little institutional memory twenty-four months from now, or twelve months from now. This will be one of multiple things that we weigh together, we put stickies up on a board and we decide, “well this only got two votes, we are not going to do this” so I am a little wary of that, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am advocating for doing it now, I am a little hung up on two[3].
And then three[4], I think that industrial zoning is clearly something on this… if that is what you are talking about…
CL That is emphasized, not de-emphasized.
BH I am talking about. What I am talking about is when we look at this[5], you’ve set out…
CL Oh, you mean if we do this immediately…
BH …we
want to deal with tree canopy, we want to deal with residential density, if you
go immediately one of these has to take a back seat to it.
CL Got it.
BH That is just the reality of it.
DR I don’t completely agree with that because I think that many of those priorities are actually part and parcel with the idea of rezoning industrial. Residential density for example, we might be looking to rezone many industrial areas as medium density residential, and then that is a density issue…
CL I think off of the forth bullet[6], as Mr. Emory said at our last meeting, is that subcommittee could be dealing with especially the industrial issue that I have and maybe other issues.
DR And the other thing too, we might not have another economic slowdown in which to work, this might be our most prime working season that we ever get. So, I am not completely averse to starting it sooner than later but…
CL Our job is to plan, it is not just every five years.
DR …I am kind of mixed, the third bullet point, I don’t necessarily know that we need to de-emphasize anything but if we were going to emphasize one aspect of the land use map it would be looking at industrial.
MF Gennie?
GK I see the land-use map as interrelated with the comp plan so if I were to support this I would want to acknowledge that this is the beginning of the comp plan review. I don’t see how you can separate them really.
MF So, you are saying yes?
GK I don’t have a problem with starting it now. To me the map hasn’t been a burning issue. I wouldn’t have brought it forward. But since it has been introduced, and I am sensing that many people do see it as a burning issue, I think it should be done, not as an independent document, but inter-related with the plan.
MF Bill?
BE There is a lot of research to do, and while there has been a little bit of a slow-down in the in-box, it would be great. The people who know planning are these guys, not us. To get them to be able to dig in a little bit and bring us a vision for how to get the zoning back to doing what zoning is supposed to do. It would be a wonderful thing to start.
There was a lot of discussion during the last comp plan, I think mainly from Peter Kleeman, about the comp plan being a living document. It is such a problem when you do this huge project, if it would be possible to chip away at important parts of it during the interim. Certainly zoning and planning for our City are the total heart of the comp plan.
GK I don’t really see how we can tackle this industrial issue without more economic information. We never get any economic information brought to us. The economic development life of this City remains a mystery to me. I mean I have no idea whatsoever, that is all done in a nice room over there that has better chairs and no name on the door. That is all secret and we are not allowed to know about that and yet then Mr. Tolbert comes and we are supposed to rezone or…
CL Well we were just told “don’t touch Allied Concrete because it is one of the biggest taxpayers in the City” so I think we just got a look-see on some information that staff has that could be shared.
GK Before we just eliminate all the industrial areas in the City.
BH I don’t think anybody is proposing that.
CL I am not proposing that at all.
GK I think we need to be informed. I know it is a changing time (trk07) and maybe we don’t have any information. But maybe we could have information about where we would like to go economically in this City and how that relates to this map and to our plan. Other than this is nice and this is pretty…
CL Or what we don’t want…
GK If we do it I don’t want it to be superficial
CL I’d like to know what Aubrey Watts sees as the future. There was awhile—I am on a train, hold on—When I started (??) my business fifteen years ago there was a push downtown to, downtown was going to be the new tech zone, high tech zone. And there still is …(??) for taxation for businesses in the City, the B-Pol tax, an exemption for tech zones. Now, there are no businesses in downtown that have ever taken advantage of that. If anybody can contradict me, I would say less than ten businesses took advantage of that…
MC Well, the bubble burst. Things change.
BE Boxer went out of business.
CL It was Boxer, it was EA. It was a great idea, they just never came..
GK Well the dot-coms went bust.
MF Cheri, can I interrupt you please? Thank-you. Almost unanimously we said yes to the first question. What I am going to propose is that some information over the course of the next- and I want to make this clear to staff too so that commissioners understand that we are putting this forward.
That we do want to proceed with updating the land use map.
That we are still a little mixed about whether we want to do it prior to the comprehensive plan or with the comprehensive plan.
But, I do want to request that we get a head start on it. And, within four months, we are provided some documentation, for some preliminary study on our part, as to what are the ten largest issues, industrial obviously is one of them. What are some of the pros and the cons that staff knows historically, and from your trained experience, to doing this. And specific information about some of the economics that are involved.
CL I’d
like to have Aubrey Watts, or someone from his office say “this is what we
think the future is, this is where we are going ten years from now or twenty
five years from now.”
MF That would be awesome
CL We see it as mixed use corridors and tourist accommodation or we see this as…
GK Or where we don’t have enough developable space from…
MF Did you hear all that? Make that part of the economic part because it is well after six o’clock.
GK Could we also have a map to show the conflict between the land use map and the zoning map just as a point of departure?
BE Can I throw in one more thing
MF Throw in one more thing
BE I’d like to have a road-map for the neighborhoods, so that we don’t get another neighborhood who says “we have been approaching you guys every five years for twenty years what are we doing wrong?”
How does one get on this list? Are these all the owners of the property? How do you get on a list…
BH That is a query of inconsistencies between…
BE Maybe we could have a list…
CL The list doesn’t necessarily mean if it was in the query, doesn’t necessarily mean that somebody has decided that there should be a change made.
BH There are some cases where we have changed the underlying zoning under a use, and that use has remained where it is. There is residential property in M1 zoning, in MI zoning. There is residential property in mixed-use zones. There is commercial enterprises in residential zones …
MF …do you still have this electronically?
MC I am sure it is somewhere.
CL I do.
MF Maybe then Cheri then could forward that electronically back to you guys and you guys could take a look at it? What I’d like to do is move off of this issue. But, before we go on to the next issue, what I want to do, right now, is any member of the public here that would like to take three minutes to speak to this so you don’t have to wait for the next hour, to the end of the meeting.
(01:04:03)
Victoria Dunham I’d like to stress once again that we were not a part of the process the last time this was done. There was no mention made of the wishes of the Woolen Mills, this has been going on for twenty-one years. It is not just our neighborhood, other neighborhoods. I would like, one of the reasons why I am here. The Woolen Mills can be used as a case study, a living case study, because we know exactly what is going on in our neighborhood. So that other neighborhoods can be examined. Because, we can tell you exactly what it is like. I think that is something the Planning Commission is lacking because you guys don’t live in industrial zones. What it is like. Your feet on the ground experience, what it is like twenty-four seven to live with this.
The ripple effect. The fact that I, in my capacity as neighborhood president, was asked by the neighborhood to contact one of the zoning inspectors because somebody had made their entire front yard asphalt to park all over it.
I was told by a zoning inspector “no, its next to an industrial property, it doesn’t really matter.” It is a residentially zoned property but it doesn’t matter?
That is one tiny example of what I see over and over and over again. (???) The ripple effect. And that is not dealt with, publicly, ever. It is just one of those little things, those feet on the ground experiences that we have in the neighborhood that need to be a part of the dialog when we move forward with the land use plan. I think it is really important.
It is very nice to sit up in an ivory tower and say “well, economically we think that that should be that” and “we are going to tell the neighborhoods what they are going to be.”
I think the neighborhoods also need to be able to control their own destinies too because… Obviously, the Diary Road neighborhood has had a lot of success staying low density residential. Nobody tries to tamper with what is going on with them.
In the other neighborhoods, usually the ones that were lower on the economic scale, they don’t have as much success.
I think that we need to figure out why my neighborhood has been asking for something for twenty-one years and has had the City turn their back on them for twenty-one years. I am so happy that we are right here, right now doing this, this is great. But, twenty-one years, I mean, what is going on?
MF It is too long.
VD What is going on? It is not just my neighborhood, it is other neighborhoods. When that can happen, what is going on? (UI) I think we all need to deal with it together. Thank you very much.
MF You are very welcome. Is there anybody else that would like to speak to this particular issue?
Keith Lancaster I wasn’t going to but I will. Having backgrounds working with staff in Albemarle County and working with comp plans and the land use map. I agree with Brian, I am not sure how you would not look at the land use map as part of the comprehensive plan, as part of the package and I think the review of that has to occur at the same time. I understand that certain pockets that you need a little more time to look at. As you are trying to plan your vision for the next work space for the next couple of years maybe take an extra twelve months before that comp plan starts but to me I don’t know how you review a land use map without reviewing the comp plan at the same time, I don’t know how you separate the two, it is one document. I would throw that out as support for that direction.
MF We are talking about four months from now, in August, we are going to have some tangible deliverables. We’ll be including some economic stuff, some examples from specific neighborhoods that we can delve into. That will provide us with a head start before the comp plan gets any further. We’ll decide then in August whether or not we absolutely want to deal with it with the comp plan, at the same time, comprehensively, or, if we want to do it as a pre kick-off.
OK, that said we are going to move on to the next topic of discussion which is on the R2U zoning proposal.
(68:30)