Planning Commission Regular Meeting/Work Session

James FeatherSecond. Second. We're moving a second to approve them as issued. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed passes unanimously. There are no items requiring a public hearing tonight, or not requiring a public hearing, nor are there any public hearings. So we'll recess our regular meeting and go into a work session. This is a work session for an update on the Urban Forest Master Plan. We'll have a discussion on the overview of the plan as it stands at this point. Welcome Ms. Stafford and company. I

Anna Saffordstaffwill put up the presentation. Tonight we bring to you an overview of the Urban Forest Master Plan project. We'll provide an overview of the work plan, the engagement plan, work done to date, as well as the project timeline. And then we'll open it up to discussion and any feedback you all might have at this time. With me tonight is Dr. Garrett Wolfe from the project team. He's been leading the stakeholder and engagement portion of the project. And so I will turn it over to him to provide the presentation.

Dr Garrett WolfapplicantThank you, Anna. Members of the commission, thank you for having me to speak tonight about the Urban Forest Master Plan. As Anna mentioned, I'm Dr. Garrett Wolfe. I'm the Director of Environmental Resilience and Ecosystem Restoration at Marstel Day, one of the project team members, leading the outreach and engagement portion for this effort. I'm briefly just going to mention the other primary team members. So the prime on this project is Davie Resource Group, or DRG. Matt Erb is the project manager. He's a senior associate consultant and an ISA certified arborist. He's also joined by Ashley McElhaney, an urban forestry planner and a certified arborist. Joining me as part of my project team on the community engagement is Madison Freiberger as a support facilitator.

So during today's meeting we'll provide a brief overview as Anna mentioned, work plan, engagement plan, and current current status of the project timeline. Following the meeting I'd love any feedback that you all are willing to provide. With that I'll go into an overview of the master plan. So to start an urban forest refers to all the trees growing within the city. This includes public and private property, street trees, trees and parks. The master plan, I'm sure I don't need to explain what a master plan is to the planning commission, but it will be a planning and guiding document that allows strategic planning and resource allocation for urban tree management in the long term. Generally, urban forest master plans explore tree maintenance, planting needs,

staff capacity and budget, invasive species, tree-related policies, volunteer opportunities and additional relevant topics for the community. This particular master plan will cover a 20-year planning horizon and it will identify the community's shared vision and goals as well as priorities and address specific challenges and opportunities within the city which are revealed in part through outreach efforts like these. This will be the first ever urban forest master plan for the city. It will create a to maximize the city's time and taxpayer dollars while responding to current and future conditions. Using a variety of recommendations, the master plan will address three overarching goals. Sustainability, to ensure that actions support long-term goals and use resources wisely.

Resiliency, to address challenges such as climate change and disease affecting the urban forest. And equity, ensuring all members of the community have access to and benefit from the urban forest. Fairfax's urban forest provides significant benefits to the community, such as improved air quality, carbon sequestration, and stormwater runoff reduction. The bottom line is that the urban forest is an important asset for the City of Fairfax and will benefit from a cohesive management plan. Next slide. The master plan will cover a handful of topics, as you can see on the slide up there. Existing conditions of the urban forest, results from public outreach and engagement activities, which will take place throughout plan development a shared vision for the urban forest

recommendations to attain that shared vision implementation guidance in five-year cycles of that 20-year planning horizon and metrics for implementation of success To monitor progress and efficacy community engagement is a major part of the process from start to finish And it's important that the plan works for both the city and its residents Next, we're going to talk about the work plan, provide a little bit more detail about that particular process. So the master plan will be developed in two phases, which we'll discuss more in a few slides. Input for both the city and other stakeholders is critical throughout the development. We're currently about halfway through phase one, which focuses on understanding existing

summarize these key findings and for the master plan goals and recommendations an outline will be formed for the master plan near the end of phase one which will be late winter early spring of 2025 and report drafts and final report we developed throughout phase two intending to end about a year from now. Next slide. As part of the planning effort of course is an engagement plan. This engagement plan is essentially a work plan specifically for outreach strategies for the master plan. It's a living document constantly updated over the course of the project and identifies who will be involved, how and when. Some of our strategies include a steering committee which meets every other month to provide updates and receive input. Members serve as liaisons to other

attended and there are relevant topics to them incorporated we'll incorporate feedback as we go to further inform both the work plan and the engagement plan and we'll be referencing public and stakeholder input heavily as the master plan is developed throughout phase two comments on the master plan will also be and responded to via comment matrices. Next slide. For a brief overview of just where we are in the engagement process, as I've mentioned, two steering committees have been held so far, July and September. The first public meeting was held in July, and the next one will be this week for in-person and next week for virtual. The public survey is live through October 25th, and we're about halfway through our stakeholder interviews.

next slide is a project timeline I've covered a lot of this material already the community engagement and plan development will continue of course through phase two phase two which will be nine months commencing after phase one which is on the screen this will include several drafts of the master plan continued steering committee meetings continued tabling and two additional public meetings including a workshop and final presentation and of Fairfax webpage. Next slide. Those continued updates to the Engage Fairfax webpage are of course publicly available to help people understand where we are in the process. We've also heard from lots of folks that City Clips and City Scene are excellent sources of information where people regularly go to

to access that information so we'll be continuing to push out updates in those forums as well the public survey is accessible from the engage Fairfax web page and if you want to go ahead and take a picture of that QR code you can take it right now if you want I have it on my slide but not on there sorry about that so just to wrap up we want to reiterate that the master plan covers a broad range of topics that affect both the city and its residents including tree maintenance planting policy stewardship opportunities and invasive species. The need for public input throughout the process is of course crucial. We appreciate any feedback from the Commission on the topics shared during this presentation tonight. That input will help us create a

Matthew Riceon a 2017 LIDAR data set and a 2021 ortho imagery data set. So what's the strategy for trying to figure out what's actually happening now I tree may not be you know crowdsourcing is great but it's definitely not something that could be done uniformly throughout the city without a huge amount of effort so what's the strategy for making sure that the estimates of canopy and the entire master plan that's based on that are actually correct with regard to what we have

Dr Garrett Wolfapplicantthen the ability to track, like, when development is occurring, what's being lost as a result of that, what's being gained as a result of at least city, private is a lot harder, city-based planting initiatives, then you can sort of keep that up as you go. And these, I'm sure, will be recommendations that are a part of the master plan.

Thanks. I just also want to add that when the data becomes available, hopefully soon, from the most recent capture that you mentioned, we're, of course, able to incorporate that, which, again, still dated, but better than what we currently have. And then also what you just described about partnering with the county is a great example of a potential type of recommendation that would fall into the master plan.

What, so basically phase one is data capture and analysis including engagement. Phase two is really the development of the plan itself. So an outline for what the plan will include will be developed basically at the end of too so that's february march time frame we're looking at and then throughout the next nine months so basically up till this time next year basically turning that outline into the master plan itself including regular updates on the status and and questions we may have for you and other stakeholder groups

Anna Saffordstaffyeah I would say a combination of the above it was identified in the comprehensive plan and so it kind of started there and then it will work down in terms of directing what additional policies we may need as well as how we implement those policies, what resources we need. And so I think there will be guidelines to help as we're talking with stakeholder groups and we see what those top priorities are. We'll build those out more. But then through the implementation and things like that, we'll be looking at it as more of a guiding document and policy for the city, similar to how transportation uses their bike master plan or parks uses their park master plan to identify what projects they want to go after and what metrics they have to meet to sort of meet those

Paul Nabtistaffby voiceintersection that was developed in a previous study was selected as was intended through the Small Area Plan. However, we all felt that we didn't have enough information to know that that option would be working the best to serve both vehicles and pedestrians and other users. And so the idea was to move forward with a more in-depth evaluation and perhaps put some more certainty into that before we take any next steps. So we'll be beginning that with this if it is funded. Another item of interest is a bicycle route wayfinding and signage investments that are recommended in the bicycle master plan that was that is now incorporated as part of the comprehensive plan there are proposed improvements to the trap road lynnhurst drive main street intersection