City Council Meeting

MUSIC Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We're going to be in the pink pink pink pink pink pink pink pink pink pink pink pink pink pink pink pink pink We really need to evaluate the cost versus risk here in city on Fairfax homelessness and the effectiveness of our police chief. Thank you. Our last speaker is Amini Bonani. Good evening, Mayor and Council. I believe the clerk has my address already on file. I'm speaking tonight as a Fairfax City resident in my personal capacity and not on behalf

of the Commission for Women. I'd like to begin by thanking Jamie Aragas, HCAB, and city staff for the tremendous amount of work that went into developing the Housing Trust Fund guidelines. I know the process required significant research, collaboration, and thoughtful planning, and I sincerely appreciate everyone's leadership. I had the privilege of chairing the City of Fairfax's Homelessness Task Force, and during that time we developed 38 recommendations to Council. One of those recommendations was the creation and funding of a Housing Trust Fund. Seeing that recommendation reflected in tonight's discussion is incredibly meaningful to me. I strongly support adopting these guidelines. My hope is that tonight is not a finish line, but a beginning of a long-term commitment to

life cycle housing in the City of Fairfax. Tonight I ask Council and staff to prioritize three things. A standardized timeline for the application process and the first award cycle. Transparent public reporting on scoring and outcomes. And measurable performance metrics like homes preserved, units created, and households served. This will help residents clearly see the impact. I am grateful that developer contributions have given the Housing Trust Fund a strong foundation. Looking ahead, I encourage Council and staff to explore additional sustainable funding options, such as recurring general fund appropriation, a dedicated share of existing revenues, state and federal grants, and loan repayments or interest earnings,

so that the Trust Fund can continue growing over time without raising taxes. Finally, as new revenue sources become available, I encourage Council to consider how the fund might evolve to support additional housing stability initiatives, such as rent relief and first-time homebuyer assistance. As someone who has spent years advocating for youth, people with disabilities, and housing stability in our community, I have seen that affordable housing is not just about building new homes. This work is also about prioritizing people who already live here and have done so for a long time like I have, so that all people, no matter what your income level is, can remain in the community we love. Thank you.

We can move on to the consent agenda. Are there any questions on any of the items on the consent agenda? Are there any items Council would like pulled from the consent agenda? Seeing none, is there a motion to approve the consent agenda? I move to approve the consent agenda item 7A through D as presented and the accompanying motions in the staff reports. Second. Motion has been made by Council Member Hardy-Chandler and seconded by Council Member Peterson. A roll call vote. Council Member Bates? Aye. Council Member Peterson? Aye. Council Member Hardy-Chandler? Aye. Council Member Amos? Aye. Council Member Hall? Aye. Council Member McQuillan? Aye. Council Member McQuillan? Aye. Motion passed unanimously.

We will go on to the consideration of appointments to boards, commissions, and advisory committees. Is there a motion to approve the appointments to boards, commissions, and advisory committees? Aye. I move to appoint the following applicants. Grievance Panel Board. Appointment of Douglas Skiba for a three-year term extending through July 14th, 2029. Appointment of George McAndrews for a three-year term extending through July 14th, 2029. Historic Fairfax City, Inc. Appointment of Thomas Davis for a five-year term extending through July 14th, 2029. Second. The motion has been made and seconded. A roll call vote. Council Member Amos? Aye. Council Member Hardy-Chandler? Aye. Council Member Peterson?

Aye. Council Member Bates? Aye. Council Member McClellan? Aye. Council Member Hall? Aye. Motion passed unanimously. Council Member geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo

to provide revenue solely for capital projects for the construction or renovation of schools and or public transportation purposes in accordance with virginia code section 58.1-605.1 i'm going to recognize jc martinez our assistant city manager chief financial officer for the staff report thank you mayor council before you consider this item i want to provide some brief background and context regarding why this matter is before you tonight first this is not a new initiative the city has been exploring the possibility of a local one percent sales tax for school capital projects since early 2024. during that time localities across virginia repeatedly sought authority from the general assembly to allow local voters to consider this option however the authority

did not previously exist so the city could not move the question forward despite that limitation the city continued to advance its school's capital program in november 2024 city voters approved a 220 million school bond referendum with nearly 70 percent of voters supporting the initiative since then council has consistently acted to implement that implement that commitment during the fy 2026 funding was provided for the initial design and planning and early construction activities for the element elementary school renovations and also fairfax high school roof replacement more recently as part of the fy 27 adopted budget council approved the next phase of financing by appropriating 22 million towards these projects

the next phase of financing by the next phase of financing by the next phase of financing the change before you today results from recent action by the commonwealth effective july 1 state law now authorizes the city to ask its voters whether they wish to adopt a local general retail sales tax of up to one percent five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five

public transportation purposes serving the city or both Even then voter approval would authorize but would not itself implement the taxed any implementation will require subsequent actions by this council It is also worth worth noting that a local retail sales tax differs from the city's real estate tax in an important way Real estate taxes are paid primarily by city property owners why a local sales tax is paid by anyone making taxable purchase within the city including residents commuters visitors and others Consequently the revenue generated from a sales tax reflects contributions from a broader group of individuals than the city's properties tax Based on current economic activity staff estimates that a 1% local sales tax could generate approximately

13.5 million dollars annually While actual revenues would depend on future economic activity and voter approval it represents a potentially significant dedicated funding source that could help finance eligible long-term capital investments and Reduce the extent to which those costs would otherwise rely on real estate taxes or other general city revenues Finally I would like to note that next week staff together with the city's financial advisor Davenport Will be meeting with both Moody's and S&P as part of our regularly scheduled credit rating review in preparation for future debt issuances supporting both school and general government capital projects In closing today's actions represent another step in a process that has been underway for more than two years

Throughout that time council has consistently demonstrated its commitment to advancing school capital improvements through voter approved bonds budget appropriations and prudent financial planning The question before council today is whether to request that the circuit court order a referendum So that city voters have the opportunity to consider this additional financing option Ultimately whether to authorize the tax will be a decision made by the voters happy to answer any questions Questions Questions Questions council member Peterson Who makes the decision assuming this were to go forward and the city had this option? Who makes the decision about how exactly? The funds would be allocated here in the city?

staff would make a recommendation via the annual budget appropriation process and ultimately city council would make that determination via the appropriation of that corresponding fiscal year's budget And that would be within the bounds of of legislation legislation that establishes a scope of it you mentioned I think the list here is school construction renovation and public transportation How much definition is there? I think particularly around the public transportation side in terms of what the eligible uses of funds are for that So some of this is a function of how this came to be just for a little more history as CFO Martinez said Originally the legislation that was pushed forward in the general assembly would have only allowed it for the

for the for the school projects projects as part of the budget process after since that failed in the general assembly they added the public transportation component I think it's to be determined I think that's one of the reasons why this is only step one and probably a multi-step process I think the reason that staff is recommending proceeding with as much with as much with as possible on the referendum question and parroting the enabling authority is it gives future councils that flexibility in years where there might not be school capital costs needing to be paid the funds could be used for public transportation including capital costs we don't know what that might look like in the future but as of right now it has a fairly broad definition of what public transportation is and that's the best we can do at this point

Very helpful let me explore that just a little bit more I haven't been in the middle of this but it's my understanding that part of the reason for including public transportation in this and of course the genesis of this so far as we are aware at least for us has always been around school construction renovation we have a school bond we have been hoping that this would become possible for that but my understanding of this is but my understanding is that one of the drivers at least for northern virginia and no pun intended here is Washington metropolitan area transit authority and providing funds for that and I know the funding mechanisms for that are changing does this create an obligation by the city to fund WMATA with these new funds how does this work no so it's it's kind of the flip

So the changes coming to WMATA funding will be effective in FY29 I believe the only tie in is if you do not meet your WMATA and this is for planning district 8 which includes us and most of the close in northern virginia suburbs the rest of the commonwealth doesn't have the authority to by the way to do the sales tax for public transportation purposes just as a matter of information If a jurisdiction within planning district 8 that has through a referendum had it approved and enacted the 1% sales tax doesn't meet its WMATA obligations then it loses the ability to use the 1% funds for anything That's the only tie There's no requirement that these funds be used for WMATA just like there's no requirement that the funds be used for school capital costs because there could be other funding sources that

Make sense from a financial standpoint to use so that's the only tie Okay, well, that's very helpful to know and then just I'm more generally I know it's to be determined, but is our best understanding that? It is Possible and or intended that the public transportation Use of funds would be very broad and flexible I don't think we can characterize that but the CFO have any information I think I think that's all to be determined I mean again this all just came out as Part of the final budget process this was not part of the long general assembly Terms, so I think there's going to be some some fleshing out some discussions and certainly the local jurisdictions will be discussing that The hope is that jurisdictions have the maximum flexibility with respect to the use of the funds

I well all very helpful clarifications more to come I Think what I would say is that if this opens the door to additional funds for transportation and it sounds like that potentially could be a significant amount two things One is I would think that I mean my own personal view is we need to prioritize School renovation and construction that was our intent That's certainly a matter for this body to discuss but it'd be in my own view, but that's the priority here The second thing is to the extent that we open a new door for a new funding stream for transportation that could involve multiple different uses I think we're going to need to be intentional about the planning and the thought process Around that because when you get a pool of funds for transportation

It's an understatement to say that you need to be very intentional about how you go Go about doing all that I just as an example. I was on a call this morning with the virginia virginia municipal league infrastructure committee assistant secretary for transportation was briefing on the state's transportation plans and put out five priority areas and I don't think these necessarily represent ours, but they do represent an intention to be planned In a deliberate fashion and add some rigor to how this how the deployment of transportation resources takes place and they include safety affordability climate and resilience economic development and good governance again, I don't know that those are Necessarily the right ones for us, but in concept

I do think that we will need to step it up a bit in terms of how we do comprehensive planning if we're going to access a new pool of Transportation funds and not be reactive and not leave it to accident Thank you Councilmember hall Thank you. Just a few questions on my part Sorry my document open here So School board has formally requested that That Supervisors consider the referendum on the ballot Or the board of supervisors is on this Council member hall. Oh, i'm sorry council member hall. Could you repeat your question? Yes, um, I saw that fairfax county school board formally requested that the board of supervisors can Consider the referendum on their ballot. We have any idea where the county is on that

No, I don't believe we do I will just jump in here and say that at the nvtc meeting where this was discussed at length the supervisors from fairfax county Said that they they thought there needed to be coordination In the region and planning district 8 before anything was done Their remarks at that public meeting and fair Ffx now reported on this it's easy to find the comments that were made by supervisors alcorn and supervisor beerman That they don't have any intention to do anything this year That they believe that anything that's done should be a coordinated effort and this was a discussion at the northern virginia transportation commission meeting So i'm taking away from that that that I don't know that there is another jurisdiction to my knowledge

That is doing anything this year on the one percent We've been talking for years several years about the one percent for our schools When virginia added this ability to do transportation it was a surprise To the members of the northern virginia transportation commission that they did that and so therefore it has been received with mixed reactions but I do not believe that any other jurisdiction is indicated in any public way that they're doing anything This year as far as I know it's just fairfax city And we have been very clear in all of our public meetings here that the intention would be that the one percent would be for schools So I hope that's helpful Yes, that I think it was either alexandrew

Or arlington that was I thought was also Formally moving forward as we have been discussing as you pointed out this has been in discussion For years. This is not new. This is not something that our residents are just doing just tuning in um With back to the the the part about it, you know being for schools versus being for transportation I personally would be open to a resolution from this council if this were to pass That would allow us to only use it for schools for let's say the first 10 years I know that you know roughly 13.5 million a year that will get us about halfway through What the bond is requiring so I would certainly be open to an additional conversation about that um I do think that and I understand councilmember peterson asked a little bit about this but

Public transportation does that do we know if that includes road infrastructure or is it mostly specifically? Again in line with wamada or bus transportation or things like that do we have any sort of clarity on that? Mr. Lovegerman council member council member hall again It's it's a little bit of a guess but I think the safe course And in looking at the uh, the enabling authority is that it's mass transit For lack of a better term Okay Um, and then my final point on this and I did email this to you mr. Lepkeman is that I think the wording of this is extremely rough and and difficult um, I think when you add in um, you know Options and things like that. I just think it gets very confusing Um, I had offered some

lesser um confusing language I thought um, i'll just read it out loud for those that might be open and then I would definitely be more open to your commentary as to why We need to make it confusing So what I was suggesting was should the city of fairfax be authorized to levy a general retail sales tax at a rate not to exceed one percent As determined by the city council to provide Really for capital projects with or renovation of schools serving the city public transportation purposes Is serving the city or both? Including bond and loan financing costs related to these purposes? I just thought it was a little easier to absorb than the um, you know, it I feel like the way that it was presented in the revision that you guys provided is inadvertently emphasizing

three categories of options instead of just a single question itself, which is Do we move forward with this and i'm worried that that's going to be confusing Mr. Lupteman so uh council member hall yes, and thank you for your uh, correspondence to me earlier um, I have a couple of comments uh, first the question was developed and has been sort of evolving in uh conversation with a number of local government attorneys bond counsel other folks very experienced in this one of the difficulties is the enabling language another of the difficulties is being first or one of the first out of the gate in terms of proposing one of these referendum questions and the consensus is and my strong recommendation i think the cfos as well

is that for this referendum we want to conform as closely as possible to the exact language in the enabling authority yes, it results in language that's a little stilted the comment i always make about referendum questions is is it'd be wonderful if our grammar teachers would write them but that's just simply not the case they they tend to be complicated they tend to have a number of sub parts we think this is as clear as we can make the question is yours probably better english and easier to follow yes but we do not recommend deviating from the recommended question the the ask that we have for you all this evening is simply to authorize placing a question on the uh ballot for november uh and to um to concur in the

recommended question that we have but i'm happy to answer any additional questions and i do appreciate i always appreciate the analysis on these things but i think in this case the safe course is to go with the question as recommended mr martinez really quickly uh council member hall in addition to the ballot question what will also be forthcoming is something known as plain language in that description it is a very simplified non-legal term of what is being asked of the residents very similarly back in 2024 when we were doing the bond referendum there is the legal language that has to be on the ballot question as mr lupkeman was explaining that has been vetted by bond council and attorneys as well and then there is a plain language or the simple

language of an explanation of what does this question mean we can definitely uh make that as simple as possible and then communicate that out either via postcards and or discussions with the residents of what does the question actually mean and then really quickly i think i heard something just want to clarify so it was presented to this council i want to say in late 2025 or early 2025 via davenport via presentation that if the one percent sales tax did take effect that 13.5 million dollars would almost cover the anticipated annual debt service payments of the 220 million it was projected that if the sales tax grew over the course of the next 10 to 12 years we would get very very closely of having that one

percent sales tax at an estimated 17 million dollars in the next 10 to 12 years that would very closely align and almost cover those debt service payments on an annual basis so there may not be any leftover money after the debt service payments for schools for anything else meaning specifically for transportation understood thank you for that clarification and i'm very happy to hear that there will be be made available um in as many ways as possible so that we can ensure people are understanding what they're actually agreeing to thank you council member mcquillen yes thank you uh what is our plan for educating residents on the details of this i'm happy to take that um there are there are requirements under virginia law as to what

must be and what can be communicated uh to residents in advance of a referendum as as cfo martinez noted uh there's a plain language requirement for an explanation uh there are also and i think i alluded to this in a recent council meeting there are also uh limitations on what elected officials may say about referenda questions so all of that to come uh we will there will be a plan presented forward for for for doing that uh and of course we will do this in accordance with as we always do with referenda in in terms of making sure the information is communicated so that uh voters go to the uh go to the ballot box with as much information as they as they need or as they want to make an educated decision excellent

and then uh what coordination has occurred with fairfax city public schools in regards to this has any coordination occurred yet council member mcquillen yes there's been coordination even prior to this there's been multiple discussions with the school board chair along with the superintendent five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five I guess after tonight, if council so chooses to pass the resolution, there will be continued coordinated effort on how this gets communicated. Again, under the requirements of how we communicate this for a bond referendum. But collectively between both bodies, there is a communication and communication strategy of how we want to go forward all the way through November.

Excellent. Thank you so much. I did just want to make a quick comment and just say that I think it's really important that we trust our residents with policy decisions like this. And I will be supporting the referendum. So thank you. Other questions or comments about this? Well, the only thing that I would say is we have been very consistent in our messaging. It was a surprise. I don't think that's overstating the case, that it was a surprise that this transportation language was added only for planning District 8. I sit on both NVTA and NVTC. We were not expecting this. And therefore, it has created a lot of questions, more questions than anything else. But as I stated, we have always determined, we have been asking for this for a very specific reason.

We've been talking about it for years. And I don't think our residents are going to be confused about this referendum, even if it says transportation on it. Because we have been very clear about what our intention was for this. And so I think consistency makes an enormous difference. And I think the plain language and coordination with the city communications team, they're the ones who did the messaging for the referendum, which got passed by a very, very wide margin. And so I trust and believe that the communications team, in concert with the staff here, are going to do a very good job on explaining to voters and residents that this is the 1% they've been hearing us talk about consistently as far as paying for the $220 million bond referendum for school renovation.

I have faith. So with that said, if there's no further discussion, I'm going to ask if there is a motion. I move to adopt the resolution requesting that the Fairfax Circuit Court order a special election to be held on November 3, 2026, on the question of authorizing the city of Fairfax to levy a general retail sales tax at a rate not to exceed 1% with revenues to be used solely for capital projects for schools and or public transportation purposes. In accordance with Virginia code 58.1-605.1. Second. Second. Motion made by Councilmember Hardy Chandler and seconded by Councilmember Peterson. Is there any discussion on the motion? Any discussion on the motion? Councilmember Peterson. Just a question I perhaps should have asked earlier, Mr. Martinez.

Can you just remind us, I know you've shared this with us before, the with and without, if we are not able to move forward with this, then what are the implications financially for the city? And what does this do to change that? Sure. And sorry, I put them into my mouth. It's my understanding Council wants to continue moving forward with the school renovation projects. And you've shown previous commitment in doing that. When we were doing the bond referendum for schools and that outreach, we had communicated the potential of about 20 to 21 cents needed on the real estate tax rate equivalent to basically fund that project. If the 1% were to pass, that equivalent 1%, the $13.5 million, would basically offset those 20, 21 cents that would be needed, meaning there may not be a need to increase the real estate tax rate to fund or to find the revenue to fund those bond payments.

The 1% should be enough to carry that going forward. Is that what you're asking, sir? It is. If I could ask you to translate that one step forward in terms of an actual cash impact on residents, if you're able to, what does that, what does 20 to 21 cents mean? And what does it mean instead to have the 1% sales tax? I don't recall the number, but it was previously communicated in 2024 language and information that was broadcasted. It was off of that tax rate or the average penny rate for 2024. I'd have to come back to council and get that. I don't want to give you inaccurate information tonight. But the essential point, as I understand it, is that the impact on a cash basis for residents with the 1% would be less than it would be with the property tax.

Absolutely correct. And as I noted, anyone coming and doing business within the city who may not necessarily be a resident, if they were to purchase something, they would be paying a portion of that sales tax as well. Any other questions? Okay. Seeing no further discussion on the motion, a roll call vote. Council Member Amos? Aye. Council Member Hardy-Chandler? Aye. Council Member Peterson? Aye. Council Member Bates? Aye. Council Member McQuillan? Aye. Council Member Hall? Aye. Motion passed unanimously. Council Member Bates. I will now recess the regular meeting to go into a work session. We will take a five-minute recess to move into the work session room. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So the first topic is the zoning structure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And this is to incentivize developers to assemble larger plots of land for redevelopment that

allow for more cohesive development. With the first draft this allowed for a 20 to 30% increase depending on the overall consolidation size of the properties. We heard mixed reviews during the first draft. Some people thought that this incentive was very important and that we should keep it. Others felt that it wasn't important or that the increase was too much. So with the second draft now proposing to keep it but the density increase range is now 10 to 20% as opposed to 20 to 30%. I'll come back to density in a minute. There are other ways that density can be increased further than this through the community benefits program. But first we'll talk about height. So for building height the recommendation continuing from the first draft is that a base maximum height of five stories

be allowed but that that can be increased if a developer participates in the community development program or community benefit program up to a maximum height not to exceed what is shown in the small year plan for that location. Since that time we have added an alternative compliance and that will allow some minor deviations to this in cases of extreme topography on a site or unique floor heights for certain uses such as institutional uses or performing arts geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo geo

and set some limitations to it. But it's something that we need to look at a lot further before we have some final recommendations. We're really just trying to get some feedback on whether or not we want to consider this or we want to just hold the line, what the smaller plan recommends, in no case would we ever want to exceed that. In our discussion with the planning commission, we had a work session on this last night and we brought this up as well. And they had some varying thoughts. In general, they were open to this idea, but really felt that if we're going to consider taller building heights than what's recommended in the smaller plans, that the city should be receiving significant community benefits that are measurable

and that we are strict when we apply them. And so we can continue to explore that, but also interested in hearing your thoughts as well. So back to the community benefits program and density. So with the review of the first draft, at that time we had already identified that we were recommending that the two types of elements that could be included in the community benefits program are land dedicated for publicly accessible open space and land dedicated for publicly accessible multimodal transportation improvements. At that time we didn't have very strong ways of measuring these though. And so we have since gone back and figured out some ways of calculating this better. What's proposed in the current draft is that we allow eight

additional dwelling units for every 3,200 square feet of publicly accessible open space beyond the minimum 10% requirement. And this would also follow the calculations using the open space table. In addition, additional four units would be allowed for every 7,200 square feet of land that is used for multimodal transportation infrastructure. And so the diagram here showing the street shows all of that. Anything that would be included in that area, essentially travel lanes, parking areas, or on street parking, street tree areas, and then the sidewalk, everything to the back of the sidewalk is what we consider part of that multimodal infrastructure area. And so on the next slide, I'll, I know it's difficult to kind of figure

out what this means in terms of development. So on the next slide, I'll, I'll go over some examples, but I just wanted to mention in the first draft, there were some recommendations about other things that we should consider providing bonus density for. And so two of those, the additional tree canopy and structured or underground parking are now included in the parking incentives section. So we're not recommending including those for the bonus density. So we don't have people providing one amenity and then getting benefits in two areas. There was recommendations that we look at providing bonus density for additional affordable housing beyond what's required through our affordable housing ordinance.

And there were concerns with the, the way the state code was written and how we would apply this. So we're not recommending that at this time for additional retail. There were also concerns with state code. However, we feel that we may be able to accommodate incentives for this, not necessarily through the same language as the open space and transportation. But if there is interest in trying to incentivize additional retail, then we can continue to look at that. And we did hear from the planning commission last night that they did ask us to, to keep exploring that. So again, looking at how all of this would, would add up. So when we, we talk about the overall residential density that could be

supported for any of these developments, or we're starting with our base density, we are adding in the bonuses that can be achieved. We actually already have bonuses to the affordable dwelling unit ordinance. But then we're adding in that lock consolidation bonus. And then these individual increases that can be achieved through the community benefits program that we talked about on the last slide. So we did some quick, very high level analysis on every development that we could think of that has come forward in our activity centers that included multifamily uses over the past several years. And so these are shown up here. We ask that you, you don't consider this as a review. Some of these projects are under review.

They're under the, the standards that we have in place. And so this is really just meant as like a high level of reference to kind of see where we're falling and not to look at any development project individually. But what this is showing us is the amount of projects that were approved or proposed for each of these projects and the resulting density. And then the, the next two columns show what we think could be approved in terms of units. And then in terms of density as well. And on the left, the arrows, the green arrows indicate that based on our review, if these projects were to be viewed under the activity center district, they would be able to achieve the amount of density that was proposed or approved or something higher.

For those with the red arrows, it would be something lower than what was approved or, yeah, what was approved or proposed. So to look at this more of a high level pattern, we, we graphed all of these out. And so this shows all of those development projects that were shown on the previous slide. But then we have the chart on the left showing how they would fall under, as they were proposed or approved under a current ordinance. And the chart under the right, how they would fall if they were to use the activity center district. And so the horizontal axis on both of these shows the total site area of each development project. And that would be the same on each side, because that doesn't change the size of the circle

for each development projects shows the number of residential units that could be supported either on the left as proposed or approved or on the right. As we think would be supported in the activity center district. And then the vertical axis shows what the resulting density is based on the site size. So you can see the general trend with our existing conditions and the development projects that we have before us. There tends to be a need for higher density development with our smaller sites. And we think the reason for that is those sites have less room for providing amenities and open space and those types of things. And then our larger sites you can see tend to have larger, more larger circles, meaning

more residential units, but less density. The way this would fit under the activity center district as currently written is that the smaller sites would be find it more challenging, I think, to reach those densities that are currently proposed. Whereas the larger sites, it would be easier for them to do it again, probably because they have the space to provide the amenities, especially when those amenities are how they get the bonus density. And then one last thing I wanted to point out just for reference is when we consider this, this is just food for thought. We did look at development projects throughout the county, particularly in those revitalization areas which we feel have the most similar characteristics to the city.

And this summarizes all of those. These are all multifamily or mixed use development projects in these various areas and the resulting density is in development amounts. And density is really the easy thing to compare here because it takes into account the size of the site. And so the range that we found in this review is anywhere from 30 to 90 dwelling units per acre in the county projects. The range of density in our review, assuming the activities in our district of development for projects that have come before us is 57 to about 92 dwelling units per acre. So roughly in line with an average density of about 70 dwelling units per acre. So again, just food for thought. We need to be thinking hard about where this ends up landing with density because we certainly

want to get as much benefit to the city with east development as possible. But we also don't want to prohibit development from happening. So that concludes the presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions and appreciate your feedback. Thank you so much, Mr. Napti. Questions? Councilmember Peterson? Thank you. General question. Just big picture. When you kicked this off and you spoke about the purpose of these small area plans, I think you indicated that the purpose was, if I get that wording correct, to receive development. Is that the correct understanding? As part of this presentation, I don't remember the language I used, but the purpose of the smaller plans was to provide guidance for development.

Okay. So I think the big picture question here is we have existing zoning and then we have the small area plans. We're trying to bring them together, reconcile them, if you will. Zoning is put in place to protect the public interest, which may include development depending on the type of development and its particular specifications. But it also has other important components of public interest, you know, quality of life, et cetera. And I guess the big picture question is when we transition from a scenario where we have existing zoning that at least theoretically was put in place with safeguards for public interest, and we go to a small area plan that may not have, because it is, I think, primarily intended to facilitate development, to what extent are we potentially

trading off the public interest as we do that? And I can't tell. I mean, in an ideal world, you kind of have a compare and contrast thing with a set of these objectives for the public interest, and you see what happens when we make this change. Have you done anything like that, or can you help to sort of portray the potential for tradeoff or for that matter improvement that occurs here? Yeah. And I would say that the key word is improvement. And as I mentioned earlier on, the way development proposals have been coming forward in relation to the small area plans has been relying on special exceptions and negotiations. And we don't think that benefits the city or the community because it isn't consistent.

We aren't always getting what we want. The purpose of putting these regulations in place is because it's codifying what the small area plans say that the community wants. And so it's giving us more incentives for those open spaces, those transportation improvements, industry scapes that we, in the current situation, end up negotiating for and often end up falling short on. Let me just be sure I understand that correctly because, again, I don't want to nitpick too much. But on the other hand, there's some important issues here. In terms of the small area plans being what the community wants, my understanding is the small area plans, and thank you for spending some time earlier today going through this,

established benchmarks for development. And they're essentially, as I understand it, scenarios, if you will, for the amount of development that could occur if we were to allow it, enable it, and otherwise pursue it. That's different than having gone through a community-based benefits process to determine which scenarios really work best for the community. And that's why I raised this point initially because typically zoning is supposed to do that. It's supposed to raise the question of what are the community interests and benefits that are at stake here to go through some form of planning to ensure that the standards that are set protect them and provide for them. Whereas the small area plans established benchmarks for development, which is a different thing.

And that's why I'm just raising the question of whether inadvertently we are possibly trading off some of the public interest that has been protected by zoning as we do this. Because there are two separate things, two separate objectives here, as I understand it correctly. And again, in an ideal world, we'd be able to do a compare and contrast to see are we losing anything in terms of the public interest as we shift over to an approach that's designed to enable development. Can you clarify what you mean by the two separate objectives? Sure. The small area plan, and again, I may be drawing on earlier conversation. They were developed through a process that while it had public awareness and some degree of

public participation, the purpose of that, and again, going back to your own descriptor here, is to enable development or to receive development and to identify benchmarks for development which are plausible and we would hope feasible in terms of the amount of development that could be accommodated. That's different than asking the question of what is the level, mixture, timing, et cetera, of development that meets a set of public interest objectives, whether it's environment, health, safety, quality of life, et cetera. Those are really two different ways of looking at the question mark of how do you use your land? So, you know, what I would say is the smaller plans being our policy, regardless of, you know,

the process that was done to develop them. They did go through a process. They were community driven. And their purpose is more than just trying to attract development. That's certainly one of the goals. But it's also to ensure that the city is getting benefits in exchange for that. And also help guide the city in terms of how we are investing our public funds. And so the intent of those plans is that they are in the community interest. The zoning ordinance, while it is also intended to protect the community interest, some of the elements you mentioned about the overall development and the types of standards that the city should be thinking about in terms of how much development we should be looking

at, those are the things that should be achieved through things like the small area plan and the comprehensive plan. And if they are not adequate in those, then we have talked about the review that we are looking at doing to update that. But the zoning ordinance is really only looking at standards on a site-by-site basis. It isn't thinking comprehensively about how much development we want or what types of amenities we want to achieve. Those are identified in our policies. The zoning ordinance is just the code that helps make that happen. And just help me with the policies that define that. Where do we find them? The policies that define those types of things I just mentioned are the small area plans.

Okay. Maybe it's worth talking a bit more about it. Because it's my understanding based on this conversation and prior that really the purpose of the small area plans was focused on establishing these benchmarks for development and trying to enable that. And in some cases the result of that has been future scenarios that look quite a bit different than what would be currently allowable under zoning. And so there's possibly a bit of a mismatch. And it could be that it goes in both directions. It could be in fact that the small area plans are improving some things that provide more public benefits. But it certainly could be the opposite as well. We, you know, Fairfax Circle we saw renderings of scenarios there that were very tall, very high

density, you know, several stories on top of Home Depot, things like that, that are really quite a bit different. And so I'm just wondering again, do we have some way of knowing as we move forward to a situation where we're letting the small area plans essentially trump the zoning here that we're not losing things that we're trying to protect in terms of the public interest along the way? So the baseline for zoning, Councilmember, regardless of the district, is that health, welfare, public safety aspect. As you note, that's the baseline for zoning. Whether that's a general zoning district or a planned development district or the proposed new activity center district. I wouldn't characterize the purpose of the small area plan was to set benchmarks for development.

The smaller area plans include guidance on estimated benchmarks for development as the city proceeds into the future. The small area plans are a product of the city having activity centers designate in its comprehensive plan for decades. Very general guidance. Very general guidance. These areas were identified for redevelopment for many, many years without much specificity in terms of what the city was looking for, nor guidance for more detailed aspects. Like, you know, this body has talked about the Greenway downtown. Or we recently talked about the idea of a linear park through Northfax. And those sorts of details weren't included in the comprehensive plan. And so what the direction was with the small area plans was to provide more specificity.

To dig down from that general plan level, the comprehensive plan, down into more of a more detailed plan for those areas. And so what we're going to do is recognizing that the city has acknowledged for many years that these are going to be areas that are going to redevelop. And so how do we best guide development interest that is going to come into the city, whether it be from an existing property owner, which we've seen in some cases, or someone coming from the outside who's put a contract on a property to make an investment. And so that's really the, you know, the undergirding reason for moving forward with a small area plan. So we did have more detail. So in turn, we could create regulations that respond to those aspects.

As Mr. Nabte noted, open space, thinking about multimodal transportation, trying to be smart about how parking is utilized, and the finite amount of space that we have in the city to be able to manage development. And so certainly the benchmarks are a part of that. And it's kind of a guidepost for the city to evaluate where we're headed in terms of implementation of the plans. But certainly wasn't, you know, I wouldn't want to characterize it as that's the driving force behind the plans. And they are certainly not goals. I know sometimes that word gets used. They are not goals. They are benchmarks and an opportunity for us to gauge where the city is heading as we move into the future. Very helpful.

But just where do goals then come in? And let's just say for sake of conversation, goals that health, safety, environment, et cetera. In terms of the plans? Yeah. So there are goals and objectives in the comprehensive plan as well as in the small area plans. Those are things that we monitor. And in fact, last night, Paul's staff was in front of the planning commission reviewing the implementation of the small area plans and reviewing kind of where the city is in terms of meeting some of those objectives in the plans. And so there's everything from, you know, public art to transportation-related goals in those plans. And those are the things that we're trying to move forward collectively as a city.

Some of those are going to happen through private development. Some of them are going to happen through city-sponsored initiatives. So the benchmarks that exist, and I think for the Old Town area it's 1,250 residential units, the benchmarks are not goals. Correct. But there are separate from that other goals and objectives. It's just they are separate. They are not same as the benchmarks that are established. Is that right? That is correct. So we should not be understanding those benchmarks as goals that we're using to achieve the goals and objectives of the small area plans? No, just a means to measure how that implementation proceeds. Because the plans do very clearly recognize these are areas of redevelopment for the city.

These are areas where the city is likely going to see a more intense level of development. As the comprehensive plan speaks, do we want to protect our existing residential neighborhoods and the lower-density areas that we have? And so this is where growth in the city is likely to occur. And so those benchmarks provide an opportunity to reflect on as the plan is implemented. Okay. So it's a measurement mechanism, essentially, is what I understand. And then I think you may have covered this in a prior presentation. If memory serves correct, none of what you're proposing here is moving things to buy right that don't currently exist as buy right. Is that correct? That's correct. Yes. Okay. Well, I appreciate the clarifications.

I do think it's very important. There's maybe a little bit of stumbling that happens over benchmarks and the confusion that they also constitute goals. And they don't. They're separate from another set of goals. So it's helpful to have that clarification. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member McQuillen. Thank you. Could staff explain how we determine whether benefits offered for the benefits, community benefits program, are proportional to the additional development flexibility that's being requested? So the way we're doing it is using these set measurements. It's not something that a developer could propose benefits and then ask to receive additional density in exchange for that. They would have to follow this formula.

So we now have something with these amendments that would be actually measurable. We'd be using the square footage of space that's dedicated to the uses that are shown here. And then they would get additional units per this formula. In current conditions, it's more of the negotiations as you kind of the example that you provided. Okay. Thank you. So my feedback for some of this presentation, and thank you for the presentation, Mr. Napty. I do support adjusting the boundaries of the historic district to better align with the National Register historic district boundary. I think that makes sense. The citywide reduction of office parking requirements, I also might support that. I would like a little bit more information and detail on that.

But I do need to raise caution in considering the reduction in residential areas, as parking tends to be one of the most common complaints among residents in multi-use housing. I also share the sentiment of the Planning Commission in being somewhat open to potential exceptions to height, but with significant and clear communication regarding the community benefit and the trade-offs with that. And I feel the same way mostly about the heights and some of the setback stuff, too. So I share a lot of the same sentiment of what was shared tonight in the feedback that you received from our Planning Commission. So thank you. Thank you. Council Member Hardy-Chandler. Thank you. I really appreciate how your presentation reflects the evolution of all of this, listening, getting feedback,

and integrating that in the next iteration or the next draft of this. So it's very clear that you're taking it in, you're integrating it, and really trying to reflect the desire of the community. I want to go back to activity centers because in the staff report, there is a great sort of description from a policy perspective that activity centers are for activity, that things would happen in those centers. And there's a part that describes development but also mixed use, being pedestrian-oriented, and having the densities to support those activities. So I think that there is a relationship between some of the things that are being considered in terms of densities and height. Height increases density, right?

But it's for the purpose of promoting the things that we have said that we value in activity centers where we want more things going on and we want more people, you know, involved in the community. So I just wanted to highlight that point but just emphasize that I really appreciate the integration of the feedback so far. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Amos. Thank you. Excellent presentation. I really love what you're doing here, and I think it's definitely on the right track, especially with some of the draft two edits. I really like the weighting structure that you included and some of the shifts you made, for example, prioritizing linear parks on a higher scale. One of my questions, and this is just more for clarity,

because you have slides focused on setbacks and buffers, but then also on which is you have a slide on setback and buffers in the weighting structure on the low priority tier. Then you have slide deck focusing on frontages. Could you just clarify more on the separation or the differences on how that would be handled? Yes. So setbacks and buffers are in these proposed amendments, they would actually only apply at the periphery of activity centers. So where an activity center might abut a residential neighborhood or lower density retail that are outside the activity center. And so that's more of a traditional standard that we have in our zoning ordinance that requires buildings to be setbacks so far and that type of thing.

The frontage areas are really just that dimension between the building face and the sidewalk. We also have your front yard requirements. The typical standard in our zoning ordinance would be kind of the most similar thing. The difference is the front yard requirement is specifically to be landscaped, whereas for the frontage zone, we want to have a variety of conditions. Thank you. So going back to the historic overlay district, just so I completely understand, is this what is being proposed, this picture here, or are you saying that the blue would also encapture the black outlines as well? This shows the current. And so our proposal would be to move the blue line to match the black line. Understood.

So even where the blue line, it doesn't look like it actually exceeds in any spot. So I understand. Okay, perfect. Thank you very much. On slide 16, looking at the office parking ratios, I'm just a little curious. So the 2.67, is that just because of the 20%? Did vacancy rate of office space factor in when comparing with the county, or is it just applying that 20% number equally to retail, multifamily, and office space? The 2.67 is applying our current office standard, which is shown here as 3.33 per 1,000. It's worded as one per 300 square feet. But we want to make it comparable to everything else. So it's applying that 20% reduction to the 3.33, resulting in 2.67. So this is what we're saying.

If we don't change the base parking requirement for office, this would be what a developer could potentially achieve if they receive the maximum 20% reduction in this district. Yes. I guess part of why I'm asking is because why couldn't that number, for example, be lower? Why is that the recommendation? Is it strictly because of that 20%? For example, everyone knows that office space isn't doing market-wise as well as others. So wouldn't we want to try to incentivize that maybe even more if we want to capture more Class A office space? Yeah. So that's one of the questions we had in looking at this. We're interested in your feedback on whether or not we should consider that. And that's why we wanted to show these numbers on the right

to see even with that reduction, the 2.67 is higher than any of these. And so if we get the go-ahead, the next time we'll come back, we'll have our recommendation on we're thinking a citywide reduction for office because this is not just unique to activity centers. And then the 20% reduction could apply on top of that new figure that would hopefully land somewhere in the range of the numbers on the right. I'll let my colleagues and the Planning Commission on that. I would certainly be in favor of that just because I don't, for me, it just doesn't make sense for it to be higher. And then for the retail component, just for clarity, that's retail also including mixed-use or is this strictly standalone retail spaces?

This would include retail that's a part of a mixed-use project as well. Yes. And the last comment I have is I really do appreciate, especially on slide 22 where you have the visual graphic, where you can tell it really creates more consistency in terms of expectations moving forward and both communications with the community but also with the development community. So we can set those expectations early on but still have the flexibility to do more depending on what's on the table. So I think excellent work. I look forward to this coming back and thank you very much. Thank you. Any other questions from any other council members? Council Member Peterson. Just a general question. I think this includes commercial and retail as well as residential,

but it does seem kind of weighted predominantly towards residential. Help me with that a little bit. Is the intent here to treat commercial and, for that matter, retail in parallel in terms of what we're trying to accomplish here? Yeah. So the challenge here is that most of the property's interactivity centers are already zoned for some kind of commercial. So if somebody were to propose a development that's entirely commercial, they would have no incentive to try to use this new district. They already have their rights. For residential, they don't have that opportunity, so we have the ability to apply this. So a lot of this is geared toward residential. We hope that there will be incentives in here

that will make people want to use it for commercial, but a lot of it is written with the purpose of addressing residential density and those types of things. And certainly when it comes to the bonus density, we don't really have the leverage to apply that to commercial uses because a lot of the commercial districts don't have a density standard. They're really governed by the overall dimensions of the site. And it's fair, I take it from that, that in terms of goals and objectives, that there is as much interest in supporting commercial and other forms of retail and business development as there is residential in these areas. Is that the case? That's correct. And if we could do more with this, then we would.

We just think that we're going to have to, in most cases, rely on negotiations again for commercial development. And in some cases, it will just be by right and we will have no ability to influence it at all. Councilmember Bates. Well, I definitely think this is heading in the right direction. I certainly support looking at off-street parking requirements, especially with regard to office. Again, something that I think we definitely want to make it easier to build in the city. And I think it's also important to point out that, to my understanding, the goal of this is to bring the zoning ordinance into greater conformance with the small area plans, small area plans being the policy that is guiding this process.

But there is a separate process that involves deciding on how we're going to be reviewing the small area plans on a regular basis every five years or so. And when that occurs, then the zoning ordinance could also be looked at as well to conform with whatever amendments come out of that process. But that's a separate process. And this is just looking at bringing this into a greater conformance with the small area plans. And the smaller plans themselves will be re-evaluated on, according to that process, separately. That's correct. Yes. Thank you. Council Member Hall. Thank you. I have a couple questions, and then I just wanted to run through some of the things that I went through earlier with Mr. Nabdi and Brooke earlier.

Sure. So I feel like we have a lot of residents here that want to do things and shop here. But I think that we are lacking in those type of offerings. You know, I don't necessarily agree that we need to influx our city with thousands of new residents to achieve these goals or these ambitions or whatever it is that we're talking about. So I feel like we do really have a lot of people that live here that are looking for things to do. And right now we're going to Fairfax Corner or we're going to Tyson's or we're going elsewhere to achieve those same things that we really could or should be offering more here in our city. And I did want to thank you for providing the setbacks on Oak Street. I think I had said before that it felt like to me when I drove by there, they were only six to eight feet.

So clearly I can't measure. So I appreciate you pointing those out that they were 14 to 16 feet. On slide 13, it talks about the contiguous linear parks and the greenways. I definitely agree that that is something that we should really, really stress to developers. I mean, it's great to have a pocket park, but it's even better to have a pocket park that connects to something else that, you know, continues to lead you along a trail somewhere. What is meant by adjusted maintenance standards on that slide? So in the open space section of the ordinance, there are standards for maintenance that would be approved as part of the approval. And they set expectations on how the different types of open space would be maintained and

who would be responsible. Part of the reason for this is that it's potential that the city could receive dedications of open space, or it could be that a property owner keeps the open space in private ownership, but makes it publicly accessible. And so the maintenance standards set the standards on how that would be maintained in each of those conditions. During the first draft review, we had some comments on that, particularly from members of the environmental sustainability committee who were very knowledgeable on that subject and provided some good guidance. So we tweaked those based on those recommendations. Okay. Thank you for that clarity. One of the slides mentions, you know, you add on 3,600 square feet of open space, and then

that would allow you to do four additional units. What we spoke about earlier when I met with you was that the equivalent of 3,600 square feet, yes, it's, you know, 100 feet by 36 feet, but a good kind of visual of that for people like me that like to visualize that is kind of the lower area at Old Town Square in front of the fountain where the kids run around. Mr. Hurden was able to kind of pull that up as a visual for me. I do have concerns, though, with adding additional height and density for achieving certain quote unquote, I just feel like they should be a standard already. Um, I, I just feel like we make so many accommodations for all this new residential that's being considered. Um, you know, there's an added cost for schools.

I think the more thousands of people that we bring in, the more police we're going to need, the more, um, services we're going to need. So I, I'm definitely looking forward to our, um, you know, services conversation in a few weeks, but I, those are some of my primary concerns. Um, and I did want to circle back on the parking for residential. Um, scouting the circle. I know you and I spoke about this earlier and it sounds like they have issued enough permits or only enough permits to accommodate their parking. But from a few people that I know that live there, they, they tend to have trouble parking. And I did ask for a little bit more kind of testimonial from them, but I wasn't able to get it before this meeting to add some additional information.

Um, a couple of other things I did want to follow up on from our earlier discussion was regarding the definition of civic space in the open space table. Um, the definition starts by listing publicly accessible neighborhood parks and urban plazas, but then it goes on to include interior spaces such as schools and childcare facilities. Um, and I think what you had mentioned was that your preference might be to remove that language to clarify that we are focusing on outdoor spaces only, um, and kind of rely on negotiations with a developer to provide something if a school ever came up. Can you kind of expand on that a little bit? Yeah. So, um, that, that language was, uh, put in, I think it was included in the first draft

as well. And, and I think it was intended, uh, recognizing that the consultant that we're working with, um, does this kind of thing kind of nationwide and a variety of conditions that they deal with. In some cases jurisdictions have sites that are large enough where they have developments that are so big that they have the ability to provide enough land to actually have a public school on or other types of public facilities. Uh, we are certainly not in that kind of situation. Um, and so I don't think that situation would ever come up. And so my recommendation is that we remove that language and only focus on open spaces. So someone doesn't read it and assume that, oh, I can receive additional, uh, open space

credit by providing a school. I should also be able to get it for this other type of indoor amenity. And we did hear from some feedback on the first draft. There were other options in there for indoor amenities that there wasn't support for. So, uh, based on that, my recommendation is to, to remove any reference to indoor amenities. But if there's other interests from the council, we're certainly happy to, to reconsider that. Okay. Yeah, I just wanted to bring that up tonight. So everyone could be aware of that conversation. Cause I do think that that's something that is probably pretty important. Um, another, one of the things that you and I discussed earlier was the fact that the showers would be available in some of these new potential, um, you know, office spaces or things like that.

And, and I think that that's a real benefit to the employees that work there. But one of my concerns, as I mentioned earlier was how do we ensure that those showers and those facilities are only used by people that work in those buildings and that they're not ending up being a public shower facility? Because I think pathway homes, they have the great shower facilities that they are taking around town. You know, they've got the new garage space that they're going to be using for them. The lamb center offers things like this. So I'm just curious how, how that works. So the, the language in the draft related to shower facilities, and just for everyone else's benefit, this is one of the, um, elements that can be included to support parking reductions with the

thought that if there are shower facilities, particularly for commercial uses, people would have the ability to bike or use other active ways of getting there. Uh, and so it allows for a parking reduction. Um, the, the concern was that if the shower facilities would be publicly accessible, um, then how we manage how they are used. The language in the ordinance says that they should be accessible to employees, not necessarily publicly accessible. It would be on, I think the onus of the property owner or developer to decide how they want to manage that. Um, or if they wanted to choose to make them publicly accessible for whatever reason, that they could do But this ordinance is certainly not requiring that they be publicly accessible.

Only that they be accessible to the users of the building. Okay, thank you. Just something I wanted to clarify. And then finally, one of the things, or one of the final things that we talked about was, um, the very last slide number 20, um, was it 24. Um, I received a couple comments from residents that, you know, I don't want to be, or we don't want to be the next Annandale or we don't, you know, want to have these places that end up with these rundown units that bring down property values that bring down rents and that, you know, are not being maintained. And I think we have some of those places in the city that are, you know, prime for redevelopment. But I also think that the price points there are not always what people are currently getting or what

they can afford. So I think that is a struggle. Um, but one of the things that struck out to me on, on this document was the density of some of those. Um, and the average density of 70. And then what you and I had discussed was the AT&T redevelopment in, um, Oakton. We also discussed the radiant Parfax Ridge, which is on the west side of Waples Mill, north of Route 50. That one's 213 units on. So it's 64 units per acre. And then Ridgewood you had provided, which is on the north side of 29 before Wegmans. That's 483 units and 53 units per acre. Um, and then the AT&T is intended to be 804 units with 331 townhomes. I think 109 or 115 are going to be affordable dwellings, which is great. But again, that's 24 units per acre. And I think when we're

looking at some of those comparisons, just immediately outside our city, I just continue to wonder why we are so heavy on this density. You know, you look at Davies, for example, that was approved at 103.8. um, gallery 103.7. Um, you know, uh, but then you've got some, you know, that cause they're only townhouses that it's 18.4. So I just like circle gateway, one that we're going to be seeing in a few weeks that I think the planning commission saw last night, 181.7 units per acre. That's crazy to me. Um, and I might be alone in that or standing on this corner of that, but I just, I don't understand why we continue to try to pack in as many people as possible in an area. Are the other places not

giving incentives for people to do this? Or is this just unique to the city? It just, I feel like we're we're at this conundrum of like, what do we want to be able to grow up? And the easy answer is just, oh, pack them in residential's cheap. People can get, um, you know, uh, uh, affordability, they can get financing for it. And I just, I think we, if we really are listening to a lot of our residents, which I'm trying to do, I don't think they support this huge high density housing. And I also don't think they support it all at one time. Like it's being done. I mean, it, you know, we haven't done so much redevelopment or a really long time. And it's almost like it's a race to see you can get it done fastest. So those are my takeaways from this. Um, I appreciate the work

that went into the presentation and all of the work that has been done up to this point. Um, quite frankly, I strongly wonder if the small area plans are what need to be looked at and not our zoning to align with these small area plans. I think that the initiation of the small area plans, yes, it was years in the making, but I also think that the public engagement factor of it was heavily done during COVID. And I think that a lot of things changed during COVID. I think people realized during COVID maybe they didn't want to live in tight packed in communities. Maybe they wanted a little bit more space, uh, on the flip side, maybe some wanted to be closer to friends and family. But I just think that there's a lot of things that we need to take away from what

we've seen and that it's not just a few loud voices that are complaining about high density. But when you go from something that's, you know, four or five, six stories, and then you say, Oh, well, we'll give you a bonus. You can add on seven. And then we say, Oh, well, look, this thing is a perfect circle. It's 11 stories. I mean, you put 11 stories in our city, you're never going to see anything under 11 stories again. So these are my concerns. And I just want to make sure that we're not just, you know, giving carte blanche to developers here. Thank you. I just want to touch on a couple of quick points there, because you made some good points. And I did want to highlight that the intention, one of the intentions of these amendments is to kind of manage

and provide more equal review of our development projects. So as you mentioned, we receive requests to go beyond the height limit. And then the next project wants to go higher than that. And so these standards will will provide more of a limit on that. We said that we will look at considering heights that go beyond the recommendation of the smaller your plans. And we'll look at language on how to make sure there are some limits or specifications on where and when that should occur. But with our current ordinance, we don't really have any of that. It's it's a developer request a special exception. If they're going about five stories, which is almost every development. And beyond that, they're all just

treated the same, whether requesting six stories or 11 stories. And then I also want to point out with densities. Also, you mentioned that, you know, we seem to getting more and more dense proposals, which which is true. And that the chart here on this slide 22 shows that on the left with the with the with the proposals up there going up to, as you mentioned, the one project, almost 200 units per acre. With these proposed amendments as written, and this could change. So I don't want to, you know, say that we're stuck with this, but they those will be managed in a similar fashion. And so that that total would come down. And so this is trying to add some control to that. The overall amount of growth

and the speed of growth is not something that would necessarily be controlled by these amendments. But as we review each individual project, we would provide more consistency consistency than we have now. Any other questions or comments? Well, the last thing I guess I will say is that we've got 6.2 square miles of land. And so some of the other big projects talking about the AT&T project in Oakton, we are talking about density be based on the actual footprint of these projects. And so we have a smaller footprint here in the city of Fairfax. So going up is about the only way you build more housing. We have older neighborhoods with small homes on large lots, which is great for people who want large lots. Later we'll be considering an accessory dwelling unit ordinance

that will allow people to do more with their small house on their large lots. But the fact of the matter is, we are constrained. We have land constraints as far as how we build housing here. And as fast as we are building this housing, people are buying it or renting it. Overlook was sold out before it was finished. The projects that we were building from the point of Fairfax to the scout on the circle to the townhouses at Northfax, they are filled up as soon as they are built or even before they're built. People want to live in this city. And interestingly, the patch, the Fairfax City patch recently wrote an article about the fact that we were identified as the fastest growing locality in Virginia

by population. But of course, we, you know, we're not Virginia Beach, you know, going from 24,000 to 26,000 people. But all of that has been since 2020. And these are the high density projects that have been built since 2020. And so it brings more density, which is good for economic development, because we want to encourage walkability. We don't necessarily want people to drive to where they go in the city. We want them to take the bus or to walk or to take a bicycle. And so urban planning has to take all of these things into consideration. But I would say, and we have this conversation about the schools, too, for being the locality with the fastest growing population in Virginia, our school enrollment did not, in fact, follow that hockey stick graphic of that rise between school enrollment and population growth. In fact, it went down this year for probably a lot of different reasons.

So I think we really do have to be very holistic in how we look at density of housing and the fact that a lot of this housing is going into mixed use development, too. So we are talking about building commercial and retail underneath a lot of this housing. And so, again, I just think it is a robust conversation. I look for people to be involved in the conversation. But we are constrained by the amount of acreage that we have. And I think with that, we are going to move on to the next presentation. I'm sorry, I wasn't actually done. If I could just have one more comment, please. Sure. Council Member Hall. Thank you. I just did some quick totals. I just hadn't had them running yet. That slide that we were presented, slide number, which one is it here?

The current development, slide 21. So when you add up the proposed units, approved and proposed units, you get 3,939. And then if you change it to the estimated AC district units, activity center units, that total then would have been 4,497. So while I understand that wasn't what was approved with these potential new zoning guidelines, we would have had an additional 558 units simply based upon the change in zoning. And then I was actually glad that you circled back to the tuition numbers because I do know that our school board was very concerned with our last council meeting in which the conclusion was drawn. I think that enrollment was dwindling. And I just want to say that our chair had indicated that our current enrollment has not yet returned to the 2017 numbers, but that our fiscal year 26 enrollment was projected to reach 3,077 students.

So our actual average daily membership came in lower, but our school board is very hesitant to conclude that we would not reach those projected enrollment numbers in coming years. So, you know, Fairfax County, they're seeing enrollment decreases, but I've asked our school board if they could delve into the numbers a little bit more because I do think that our city students are actually increasing. And you have to remember that, you know, some of our schools have a large majority of county students in them. So we can't necessarily dictate what they're going to have, but it's all really useful information, I think, and just shouldn't be looked at as one specific area of it. So thanks so much for that.

Thank you. I think we are going to move on to the next agenda item. Ms. Shinaberry. Our next item is the Urban Forest Master Plan update on the one-year plan and the five-year outlook. I'm going to recognize Anna Safford, our urban forester, for the staff presentation. I'm not sure if it is. Maybe you should do it. Maybe you should do it. Let me see. Okay. So now I just go to presenter? Yep. Okay. Okay. Okay, good evening, Mayor and City Council. Tonight I am here to provide a summary overview of the Urban Forest Master Plan's one-year implementation plan and five-year implementation outlook. Before getting into the presentation, I figured I'd orient you to the other materials I provided in the staff report.

The staff memo does provide description for each of those supporting documents. The important ones to note are the full Excel spreadsheets of the one-year implementation plan. All the actions that are proposed to be initiated in 2026. And then the next spreadsheet is the five-year outlook. These are all the actions within the Urban Forest Master Plan that have been listed with a one-to-five-year implementation timeline. Tonight I'll be touching on all of these at a high level. And so I recommend referring to those spreadsheets for the full implementation plans. And then the last two items are reference materials that were used to help guide the creation of these plans. Staff created a working group between the City Manager's Office, Community Development and

Planning, Public Works, and Parks and Recreation to coordinate drafting these plans. And then we used the key performance indicators, the KPIs table that was provided, as well as the 2024 operations review to help inform these plans. And so those were provided as reference and I'll be touching on them throughout the presentation. So the next few slides are the overview of the one-year plan and five-year outcomes. On the left hand of these slides we have again the actions we anticipate starting in 2026 or they were identified as ongoing tasks. As we build upon the one-year actions we look on the right-hand side and we have five-year outcomes. These are you can think of them as deliverables or results.

In the Urban Forest Master Plan they were identified and called strategy metrics. And then at the bottom of the slides we also include the identified lead and support roles that were included in the implementation table of the Master Plan. So starting with the first objective, PROTECT, in 2026 we will begin a natural areas assessment of the City's owned natural areas. Begin researching City-owned parcels and available conservation and management designation options. And drafting a pest and disease list with best management practices. So really looking at data collection around our forested areas. As we build upon this we would anticipate a natural areas action plan and pest and disease response plan.

Those would be highly related and so might be combined to one product. As well as additional protocols for urban forest disaster, storm and urban forest threat response. The lead identified as my position. This is built into my position's primary responsibilities. And then we have significant support from community development planning and parks and recreation. Next moving on to regulate. In 2026 we would be starting or we have started reviewing our existing tree regulations within the zoning ordinance as we mentioned this evening. Continue embedding the urban forest master plan goals into city plans, policies and capital projects. This is an initial effort in 2026 but would be anticipated to be an ongoing effort as of course policies

and capital projects continue. And then developing policies or further developing policies for capital improvement projects. As we complete and work on this we would anticipate our tree conservation regulations being updated with an alignment with state enabled legislation. We would have a tree replacement policy issued for both capital projects and city operations. Our capital projects would begin including tree planting and preservation starting at the budget planning phase and we would be issuing and have developed more technical resources for capital projects for their design phases. Again this is built the lead is my position and built in within in my positions responsibilities. And then the supporting roles would be CDMP capital project managers and department heads.

It might be frozen. It's five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five

to removal ratio, planting one tree for every tree we remove, prioritizing projects for additional, any additional projects for planting in low canopy neighborhoods. Low canopy neighborhoods is defined in the staff report as well as it is within our key performance indicators table. So I recommend referring to those for understanding that more. Improving cross departmental coordination for budgets and planning and identifying resource needs for young tree care. We over the past two years or three years have been increasing our tree planting through the sprout initiative. And so of course, as we have been planting trees, we need to make sure that they're surviving as well as getting the maintenance they need

to reduce maintenance costs into the future. And that's why a young tree care program is important. Over then the next five years, some outcomes we would expect is a tree planting services contract, dedicated budget line items for tree planting program, increasing and sustaining a one-to-one planting to removal ratio. Again, over the past couple of years, we have been exceeding this one-to-one ratio, largely through the sprout initiative, which has been supported through a grant. And so the goal would be making sure that sustain is sustainable moving forward as we transition off the grant, updating the city's master tree list with climate resilient species, and designating a lead for young tree care,

as well as having work plans and resources under development. The important thing to note with this objective is during the review, we identified it as our most challenging objective to implement largely because of existing staff capacity constraints. And so as you can see, there is no designated specific lead. It's a shared coordination between my position, right-of-way, and the Parks and Recreation Department. And we also recognize that there would have to be considered increased resource allocation towards this objective. I also want to note the right-of-way and Parks and Recreation divisions that largely do tree planting are also the leads on leaf collection season. Leaf collection season runs October to December.

Tree planting season runs October to December. Historically, leaf collection season has been the priority. And so we largely contract out for tree planting. And that's why it creates a lot of coordination and planning challenges. Oh dear. There we go. Okay, objective number four. We would initiate a transition plan for a centralized division using the operations review that I've mentioned. This would review existing capacity, roles, budgets, to identify opportunities for efficiencies, prepare the FY 28 budget using those recommendations, and increase and prioritize staff training, specifically on the work order system to track tree maintenance work more closely, as well as provide staff training

on the urban forestry equipment that the city does own, that we underutilize because of the barrier around needing staff training. In five years, we would look to be having an urban forestry division with dedicated and consolidated budgets. And we'd start identifying resource gaps post consolidation. And we'd want to identify those, or we would have identified those work areas for the new division, clarifying the roles of staff post consolidation. The lead on this has been my position, but again, it has included significant cross-departmental coordination with CDMP, public works right-of-way division, parks and recreation, and the city manager's office. This objective is seen as a large barrier

to effectively implement many of the other objectives in the plan. And we would likely need to be looking at either increase in resources or just reallocation of existing resources in order to effectively move this objective forward. And then the fifth and last objective is engage. This is continuing the sprout initiative work, stabilizing and refining the volunteer programming that we've kicked off for the past couple years, promoting accessible resources for private tree care and establishing public reporting cycles that I'll touch on in a couple slides. And then the five-year outcomes would be a volunteer resource hub and tracking system, multilingual and ADA outreach materials, and reporting cycles in alignment with the annual state

of the urban forest report on a consistent basis. Again, we do have a lead within my position, as well as I would say the stewardship coordinator's position. Both of them have responsibilities in those positions towards this objective. And then significant support from our sustainability division, the environmental sustainability committee, and parks and rec. Next are a few graphics from the urban forest master plans dashboard. I'm currently using the project management software monday.com to track both the urban forest master plan as well as everyday tasks. And so they're being tracked alongside each other. On the first one, status, as you can see, for actions with a one-to-five-year timeline,

approximately 50% of those actions have been initiated to some sort of extent. On the bottom left, we have barriers. Barriers were the resource demand boxes included in each of the strategies in the urban forest master plan. Within the one-to-five-year time actions, you can see about two-thirds of them relate to existing capacity, whether it be looking at assigning roles and responsibilities within existing capacity, cross-departmental coordination, or training existing staff. And then the last graphic on the right-hand side is feasibility. This we define as a summary of an action's implementation feasibility, or how hard or easy an action is to implement based off of current resources. So we kind of use this basic green, yellow, red status.

About a third of our actions are in the green. And that has defined capacity and less than one barrier. Yellow, or about also a third to one-half of these actions, have informal defined capacity and a few barriers, and then about a quarter have no defined capacity, would need new resources, and currently have many barriers to implementation. And again, this is the one-to-five-year actions. Next is also one of the dashboard graphics for our key performance indicators. Again, the full table was provided as an attachment, and this is table eight from the Urban Forest Master Plan. We have 13 KPIs in our plan. They're mapped to our three main goals. As you can see, goal number one and goal number two

show that we need the most improvement. Largely, those improvements are around KPIs involving increasing canopy coverage in those low canopy neighborhoods, mostly around tree planting, increasing the young tree care, increasing staff capacity, as well as beginning to track tree maintenance and tree risk assessments more closely. And then we're having most success with our goal number three. A lot of that revolves around, again, public engagement activities and volunteerism that we have through the Sprout Initiative. I think included in your materials, but possibly not in the slides, I do want to touch on the anticipated reporting cycles that we will be having. So on an annual basis, you can expect a report out

on the Urban Forest Master Plan's key performance indicators as well as a summary of the one-year plans strategy metrics or those outcomes through the state of the urban forest report that we would share both publicly and with city council. Then on more of a quarterly basis, we'd be providing seasonal updates, likely through your weekly city council updates. You can think of these as upcoming projects or project summaries, such as for significant tree removals or tree planting projects. And then we would continue our regular public engagement on a more bi-monthly or monthly basis through various platforms. Again, notifying the public on projects, but then also education campaigns and engagement opportunities.

The Urban Forest Master Plan does recommend refining how we report out to the public as well as coordinating these cycles as the program evolves and as work progresses. But for now, we're looking at an annual, quarterly, as well as periodic public engagement through those various platforms. And then lastly, we wanted to briefly, so the past few slides were a five-year look ahead. Of course, a lot of the conversation is around the coordination and some of the challenges around capacity. But we wanted to highlight kind of a five-year review or looking backwards for the past five years where we've made progress. So the accomplishments on the list aren't comprehensive, but highlight some of the key areas that we've made.

And then I used the KPI or a few of the KPIs to compare our progress from 2020 to 2025. And we've made significant progress in all of those KPIs so far over the past few years. And then also included just some project photos of this past year. Where we removed the invasive pear trees on Pickett Road that had been safety concerns and hazards. We planted them with native trees. The bottom photos are from a volunteer event at the Bells Bird Sanctuary, removing invasive shrubs. And then the last photo is from our 40th anniversary Arbor Day event where we replanted along the creek there, reforesting it after parks removed a playground. And that was in partnership with volunteers, the ESC, as well as even the city jobs program.

And so with that, I will happy to answer questions. Thank you for the presentation. Questions for Ms. Zafford? Councilmember Peterson. The most important question is how are the goats doing? They're munching away. How much longer? For another... About a week. Really? For about July 20th or so. And then we will do follow-up treatments now that we can kind of get a lay of the land a little bit more. And are they sticking around somewhere else in the city or are they heading on to greener pastures? Greener pastures for now. And are they observable? Can people go up and see them? Yes, correct. Yeah, they're just don't touch the fence. It's electric, but you can see them. Right now they're kind of on the near the cemetery side of the property.

And how many are there? I believe there's about 20, a little less than 20, like 16 to 20 of them. They're very cute. I recommend. I'll bet. Well, I can imagine. I live right behind one of them, and they've been very quiet. Oh, good. I'm very surprised. I thought they would be making plenty of noise, but they've been really very quiet. Thank you so much for doing this. And I know it's been a group thing. A lot of people have been involved. I really like the framing that you've been able to bring to this with these different categories to protect, regulate, grow, manage, engage, et cetera, because it helps to bring together a lot of different things, but in a framework that's organized and makes it a little bit easier to understand what are we really doing here.

And it cuts across a lot of areas. So that's really helpful. I think a lot of people had a question or two about the protect area. So what I see in the protect area is part of what I see is that you are doing some analysis of, let me just pull this up more specifically, you're doing some assessment of risk of development to prioritize conservation through acquisition or conservation estimates. And that's under this subcategory of conserve, connect, and expand tree canopy through strategic conservation and land use policies. And really applaud and appreciate the effort to bring some measurement to this. I think it's critical. And as I think we've discussed before, to try as well as we can to sort of forecast that forward when we're doing the risk analysis,

kind of project forward where we're headed. What I didn't see here, and I'm interested in thinking about it, was at some point consideration of some sort of goal here that would be no net loss or some protection. And I believe Fairfax County has a goal, I think it's 60%, either retention or no net loss or something. But I'm wondering at what point is that something we might consider here, and to what extent does Fairfax County provide a model for that? I'm not aware of their model. I know they're also doing more of a GIS assessment coming up on their areas. But I think right now our starting point is kind of getting an understanding of what we have throughout the city, whether it be city-owned or potentially not city-owned but potential areas we'd want conserved.

And then kind of getting, being able to set a goal from there. And so I would foresee probably it would be in that next phase of the five- to ten-year phase, as well as, if you recall, in the Urban Forest Master Plan, at five years we would do a comprehensive review and updates. And so it could be something we can consider at that time. But I think it's hard to know how to set the goal until we kind of get an idea as to our baseline. Great. So basically it's assessment first. We're not. Yeah. It's absence is not an indication that it's not, it would not be a future consideration. It's just we're taking it a step at a time here. Right. Yeah. That's really helpful. Can you clarify the grow versus remove, how that actually works?

What are we planting? What are we removing in that ratio? Yeah. So historically we have tracked tree removal from city operations in our parks and in our streets right-of-way area. Last year I started tracking or making an attempt to track also our capital improvement projects. So I guess first off that ratio is based off public trees, not private trees because we don't have comprehensive data on that. And then when it comes to public trees, again, trying to incorporate the capital improvement projects. And that's why also you see a big increase from last year of trees, number of trees planted to remove is because our capital projects have tended to plant a significant amount more than removed.

And so that bumped our numbers. Helpful. When, and getting back to the assessment question in terms of canopy, this is a forest versus trees question we've talked about before. I'm not sure what we're counting, but one way to do this is individual trees and or canopy. The other is to look at, for lack of a better word, a forest system, which is the community of trees and other vegetations together, vegetation together, which is really what constitutes one of the building blocks for an ecosystem and provides a lot more than just trees with canopy. Are we looking at both when we do this assessment to see what the risks are and then potentially in the future, the remedies in terms of vulnerability and loss?

Yes. So the canopy assessments are looking at both public and private trees. So citywide, all canopy coverage. And so that gives us an idea as a city or as a community, how our canopy is changing. It is looking backwards because that's just how the aerial imagery comes out. Our planting to removal ratio is more of a metric of how the city government is doing within our own city trees, how we're managing our own city trees and tracking that progress. And so it's kind of two pieces and they are related. And then like the natural areas assessment and inventories and all those things, they start to provide us a bit more of the condition and more of the qualitative data to go along with the quantitative data

with whether it be the canopy assessment of tree percentages. Then you do the natural areas assessment and you get more of the qualitative data. And so all of that data is kind of building upon itself to paint a picture, but not any one metric tells the full story. But we are including natural areas in this. Yes. Great. Fantastic. So I am curious to know on the tree survival rate. My memory is a few years back when we discussed this in the Environmental Sustainability Committee, the survival rate for trees that were planted was low. I think the numbers, I don't know if I have the numbers correct, but it was like one out of seven, like a 14% rate or something. It was actually a real concern. And I see today that we have 82% here,

which is fantastic because, you know, we want to retain trees. Is that primarily because of additional watering that we're doing? Has that been the game changer here in terms of retention? To be honest, I think I can't exactly say why. I think it's improved tracking. I would say previously I wouldn't, I don't know if we necessarily had the strongest numbers to support what the survivorship was versus now we are more closely tracking it. But we are, and we have increased the summer watering. And so it might be from both, but I would say the increase could be just because we're tracking it more closely. Okay. And then I guess my last question, and it kind of raises the question mark of what are we doing or envisioning doing

to help private landowners grow, protect, manage their trees? Do we have education, outreach, technical assistance? Can you kind of describe that? Because there are those areas that we're in control of the public lands, but most of the city is not in our control. And so we have to rely on other people to protect and manage their trees. Can you just describe a little bit about how that effort is going and where that may lead? Sure. So in 2026, our primary focus has been trying to push out a quarterly educational campaign of some kind. This past spring, we sent postcards to residents that live in the resource protection area to inform them what the resource protection area is, how you maintain your trees and vegetation in those areas,

and how you can support the Chesapeake Bay Act in that way. And so that was what we did this past spring. Looking forward, we have identified beach leaf disease in the city. It's a very infectious disease that will ultimately kill off a lot of our beech trees. And so we are planning to try to raise awareness, provide information as to how residents can treat their trees or monitor them. And so that's kind of the focus there. And then the last thing I would note is we do hope to continue our free residential tree giveaway that we've done the past couple years, so both fall and spring, providing free trees to residents. And so between the quarterly education campaigns as well as the tree giveaways

and the volunteer engagement is kind of the approach. If somebody wants to call for help, who do they call here in the city? Largely, they call me or I also defer them to our stewardship coordinator. Sometimes we have limitations as to how we can help, but we're a good starting point. I forgot to ask one thing. Tell us about lanternflies. The spotted lanternflies, we're entering the adult fly. They are here. They're the ones that are red and they look pretty, but they're annoying. In areas north of us, we have seen that they peak after a few years, and so the hope is in the next couple years we see a peak and then populations start to settle off. They aren't super harmful to our trees, but they are a nuisance as well as they're harmful to agricultural plants.

So Loudoun County and those jurisdictions have more concerns around them. Okay. Really helpful. I will note that they, based on my experience, they tend to like fruit trees. So forward. Thank you so much. Council Member McQuillan. Yes, thank you. How often will the tree canopy data be updated, and how quickly do you think we're going to see progress in the priority neighborhoods? So new imagery becomes available approximately every two years. Imagery is from the federal government, and so sometimes there are delays, and there's kind of an unknown as to what the future of that might look like, but hopefully every two years. Our priority areas, that is why it is included as a KPI, because over the past 10 years, we've been seeing decreases in those areas,

and so we want to make a concerted effort. In terms of reporting out increases in those percentage numbers, it does take then a few additional years to see an increase, and so we probably won't see progress on those for five to 10 years based off of current efforts. Okay, thank you. And then several of your implementation items identified budget or staffing restraints or barriers, and I was just wondering which investments you would suggest have the greatest impact on achieving the goals of the Urban Forest Master Plan as we go into our next budget season and start those discussions. So I think the recommendation I have made to staff is really needing to work towards consolidation, needing to identify the lead amongst the three departments,

particularly around tree maintenance in the city and management of city-owned land. I think when you have many people involved, then it's challenging for any one person to be lead, and so I think the first step is that consolidation, and then I think from there there's still staffing capacity. I think budget-wise, we've dedicated stormwater utility funds towards urban forestry, and I think those stormwater utility funds have been helpful, but I think it's hard to implement when you don't have the staff to issue those funds, and so I think it really does come down to staffing. Yeah, thank you. One last question. You mentioned the measurable performance indicators earlier in your presentation.

Are there any specific indicators that we should be, as council, be paying particularly close attention to? Anything specifically, or are they all equal? I think the first goal is a bit more comprehensive and a city-wide look, a community-wide look. The second goal is a bit more city operations, and then the third goal is how the community kind of engages with both of those, and so it probably depends on where your priorities are, but they are different in kind of their function, if that's helpful. I understand. Thank you. Council Member Hardy-Chandler. Could you go back to the slide that had the feasibility, the barriers, and the ones that have started to some degree? Yeah. When I look at the two biggest barriers, when you were talking about the capacity,

and I think you were starting to go in this direction of cross-departmental coordination, what are some other things that might be helpful in terms of either mitigating some of those barriers or overcoming those barriers? So, I mean, the establishment of the working group has definitely been helpful in terms of making sure everyone is at the table. And, you know, working with three departments, it's helpful to have all three department heads, right, the decision makers all at the table together. And creating that working group meeting on a regular basis, I think is continuing that is definitely the first step. And it provides insight to you as to what each department's priorities and work plans are looking like so that as we look ahead at upcoming projects

and needs, being able to get that picture on a more regular basis from them. Because I think the adoption of a plan, we want it to be successful. And so when I hear some unevenness in the feasibility of some of those goals, it's really important to, I think, support the things that are going to make all of those goals a little bit more successful. So with that working group, do you anticipate that feasibility cycle moving to more green? Hopefully. I mean, I think I would anticipate hopefully it's shifting more towards that task dependent, right? Task dependent is a barrier of we can't start a task until we potentially have to complete other tasks that need to happen first. And so it just being a matter of needing to do regular work over the next 20 years is the hope.

I do think that fundamentally we are, again, like the staff capacity is a real constraint where until we figure that out, we're not going to be able to really patchwork the plan forward. We'll be able to make progress at a certain rate, but I think there are some that will become very challenging to implement over time. And we want your success, so sustaining is not enough in order for you to be successful. Right. Okay. Thank you. Other questions or comments? Anybody online? Okay. Well, thank you so much for the presentation, and we look forward to future updates on this. Sure thing. Okay. Our next item is a discussion of housing trust fund guidelines and application. I'm going to recognize Jamie Ergas, our housing program manager for the staff presentation.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. As I transition slides, I would like to recognize that we have members of our housing and healthy communities advisory board with us, including our chair. Okay. So this evening, I'm bringing forward a recommended process to give access to the existing housing trust fund or what we refer to as the housing trust fund. Before we get into the drafted guidelines and application, I'll touch briefly on background and context, touching base on the housing affordability, timeline, regional context, the existing funding that the procedures are for, and then we'll get into a high-level overview of the guidelines and application, which were included in your packet. So talking about housing affordability, the points that I'll go through are not necessarily new.

These were brought forward in the development of the affordable housing strategic plan. So this is part of the research that TPMA had done. But I think it's important to talk about it so that we're grounding the conversation in the why. So as we're talking about the housing trust fund and the need to have access to the existing funding, this helps frame that. So first, the rising home prices. Between 2020 and 2025, the median sale price of a home in the city of Fairfax increased by 34%. And during that same five-year period, incomes increased by 8%. So all of that to say is that home prices are rising faster than incomes are rising. With that, homeownership is challenging for households earning less than $200,000,

specifically for that median sale price home, the single-family home. And then to rent a two-bedroom apartment in the city of Fairfax, household would need about $92,000. Naturally, with rising home prices, rising faster than incomes, that leads to strained household budgets. So we do have about 43% of renters in the city of Fairfax and 20% of homeowners. They are considered to be cost-burdened, meaning that they are paying more than 30% of their income towards housing. Affordable housing is economic development. We have workers in seven of the ten most common occupations in the city of Fairfax would not be able to afford the median gross rent for a one- or two-bedroom unit in the city. You might have seen Fairfax County's housing needs assessment that was conducted recently.

When you look at surrounding jurisdictions, they are also signaling that they have a shortage of affordable housing. The county had previously talked about needing 10,000 affordable units by 2034. They're now looking more at about 13,800 units, and particularly at 60% AMI or below. And that's just of the affordable housing. They also have a shortage of housing overall. So when we think about the workforce, it is increasingly challenged to commute in. And when you think about occupations that would require you to start at a certain time and have to compete with traffic, that becomes significantly challenging. So all of that is just to ground the conversation. When we think about the housing trust fund,

conversations in the city of Fairfax have happened well beyond the timeline that I have up here. So I think dating back to 2013, perhaps earlier, but I thought it might be helpful to revisit some of the more recent conversations that were had, including the presentation from TPMA to the council on the affordable housing strategic plan in November. And then the HCAB presented to council in December. The affordable housing strategic plan was adopted in February of this past year, earlier this year, rather. And then the guidelines conversation tonight is focusing on hopefully a way to use the funding that is available. So to provide a regional context, this is data that is reported directly by localities.

This includes 17 jurisdictions in the metropolitan region. This is data from the housing indicator toll survey. So this is done by housing and in the Urban Institute. This just gives a sense of how jurisdictions surrounding us are using their housing trust fund dollars. So the light blue is for production, affordable housing production. The yellow is for preservation. And the darker blue is protection. And protection refers to people as opposed to units. So assistance to renters or assistance to homebuyers. Additional regional context. This is the left-hand side of the screen focusing on the per capita reported budget allocation between FY25 and FY27. So this accounts for the population size within the jurisdictions.

FY27 is the yellow. The darker blue is FY26 and FY25. I did include the city of Fairfax and the city of Manassas on here as well, just to give you a sense of where we fall, even though it's not a reoccurring source. And then I do want to highlight the city of Manassas, since this presentation was created, has since invested some of their funding in affordable housing development. So that balance is slightly lower as of today. And on the right-hand side of the screen, just because it can be challenging to think about the per capita investment, you can see the total investment, at least for FY27. I do want to highlight here that for Prince William County and the city of Falls Church, the balance of their housing trust fund is larger.

I believe Prince William County is more around $20 million. City of Falls Church, around $7 million. But this is their annual investment for the most recent fiscal year. When we say housing trust fund, we're talking about the funding that was committed by developers prior to the adoption of the Affordable Dwelling Unit Ordinance in 2020. A housing trust fund usually implies that it's a reoccurring resource, but that's the terminology that we use for simplicity. There is a balance of $542,524. I understand there have been questions in the past about where this has come from. So this chart below just gives that transparency. There's the date alongside, the project name, the purpose that was outlined in the proffer agreements,

and then the balance off on the right-hand side. This also includes a debit or an expense, the funding that was utilized for the Beacon Landing project. So now transitioning into the guidelines and application themselves. This is just going to highlight some points of it. You have the full application and the guidelines that are all within one packet. But I wanted to just start by talking about the development and how we arrived at what was provided. So the Housing and Healthy Communities Advisory Board formed a strategy team after the presentation in December and had been meeting regularly to develop processes and procedures. And there's also full input from the board as well. The processes from multiple jurisdictions were reviewed, including Fairfax County and the city of Falls Church.

Many jurisdictions have housing trust funds. We looked at lots of different methods and processes so we could borrow and learn and see what would be most effective in the city. We also got input from city departments and divisions, including human services, community development and planning, economic development, development of budsmen in the city manager's office. I will say that as the process is focusing on the existing funding, which is the $540,000, we really were trying to strike the balance between getting enough information from proposals coming forward that it could be evaluated and a decision could be made about what would be best for the city and the best use of those funds, with also noting that the size is one that we didn't want to make too much of a process.

So we're trying to strike the balance between comprehensive and not be a barrier for some of the applicants that could be submitting proposals. The guidelines themselves start off with the purpose. It does note that the housing trust fund plays a central role in the city's broader affordable housing strategy. After describing the purpose, the amount available, it shifts into eligibility criteria. So applicants would need to demonstrate financial stability, organizational capacity. They would need to show that they have experience in whatever type of housing project that they are proposing, and they would need to meet eligibility requirements for any other funding that's associated with the project,

and they would need to be in good standing. The eligible activities that are included in this process are development, preservation, acquisition, or rehabilitation of affordable housing. All of these activities are in alignment with the strategic guiding documents, including the city's affordable housing strategic plan, as well as the comprehensive plan. There's a minimum project threshold criteria that was established. So projects would need to demonstrate readiness to proceed. They would need to demonstrate financial readiness, entitlement zoning, site control. All of that is spelled out in the guidelines. So that would be what would be expected of a project coming forward. The scoring criteria is meant to ensure that there's a transparent process.

And in the development of the application itself, we were really thinking through the questions. We tried to, if we were asking a question, we tried to correlate it back to the points so that it was all directly connected. So we didn't ask anything that wasn't scored. And really trying to think about the core areas. Again, this was looking at the surrounding jurisdictions, thinking about our comprehensive plan and our affordable housing strategic plan, and figuring out how to align so that we can score effectively and figure out which projects should proceed with funding. And then for the evaluation selection, we would have an initial review by housing division and finance staff to look at that threshold criteria.

There's also, I should say, a minimum threshold scoring that was established as well. And then the selection committee would be comprised of representatives from both advisory boards as well as staff. So representatives from HCAB, Planning Commission, Fairfax City Economic Development Authority, as well as a staff member from CDMP, Economic Development and Human Services. And then given the amount that is available and the fact that it is currently a finite amount, the recommendation is that the city manager be authorized to approve the funding awards that are already set forth for this specific purpose, which is also in alignment with the nonprofit grant process. And then should this process be approved to go forward, we would work to develop clear timelines.

So ensuring that we have a clear application release date, information session, deadline for application questions, make sure that we're clear when the applications are due. We would have the review process established and make sure that the applicants know from the beginning, from the time that the proposal is due to when they can anticipate the award of the funds if they are selected. All of that would also be towards the notification and the distribution to the applicants. That would be in collaboration with the city attorney to mirror the nonprofit grant process. And that is the presentation. I will be happy to take questions. Right. Council Member Amos. Thank you. And this was an excellent presentation, really liking the process that you've established.

I'm going to put on my developer hat, and I should have asked you when we had our meeting, but I appreciate the one-on-one. So I just wanted to say from a developer perspective, having something like this in place is extremely helpful. I've applied for jurisdictions that have a very rigorous process and some that have none at all, and none at all can be very confusing and lead to multiple rounds of review that can delay the process. So this is really good to have. Going into questions, so from one of the slides where you show what was allocated for new construction, it was from a hit, I believe, with the Urban Institute. So you had new construction, preservation, some for first time, homeownership programs.

Have you considered doing something like a pool system, almost like what the state does with LIHTC applications? Was that on the table, and was that just not included particularly because of maybe the... I'm going to assume we're talking about more than just the $500,000 because that's a drop in the bucket, but I mean moving forward, was that on the table or not particularly? Yeah, I think not particularly because the focus initially is on the existing $500,000 that's available, $540,000. I think the hope in developing the processes is that this will solve for the current balance, but also be available for future use should there be funding allocated in the future. So it hasn't been considered just yet, but I think should more funding become available,

processes could always be tweaked or adjusted, especially as funding is dispersed. We could learn from that process and see what could be strengthened. Thank you. And, yeah, again, pretty much my questions are just going to not factor in the $500,000. Again, that's just really a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. But in terms of a cap percentage or number for allocations per project, have we considered having that or no? Some jurisdictions do it, some don't. Assuming that we would get multiple applications from the same project perhaps year over year? I was going to ask that one next, but just in general, like, for example, per year we have a certain amount within the fund. How much can one project get as a max?

Yeah, I think that we have not established. I think that would be something that the selection committee would have to look at. So say we have three applications for the $500,000, but they are, you know, total $1.5 million. I think the committee would need to decide if there is one application that is warranting all of the funding or if it would make sense to disperse the funding amongst the projects. It would also depend on whether or not that would be feasible for the projects, right? So they might have asked for a certain amount because that's needed in order to make the whole project succeed. So I think things that would need to be considered further. That makes sense. And, again, you know, some projects, as you were referencing, are split.

So 9%, 4%, they could be hybrids, and those are technically two different projects, even if it's in the same building. Would they still be able to apply per LIHTC application? Yeah. I mean, I don't think we went into that level of detail. Might be too early, yeah. Yeah. We do anticipate for affordable housing development when we're thinking about the use of the funds, we anticipate that there would be two to three applications for projects that are already approved that would be either in the construction phase or nearing the construction phase. for this cycle. We don't yet know about any of the naturally occurring affordable housing, if any applications would come through for preservation. So I think we haven't yet had a process in the city to make it transparent

and to access this funding. So we are a little unsure of what exactly would come forward, and if we would need to think about any adjustments in the future, should there be a lot of competition for this resource? Yeah. Granted, this is new for us, and it's probably more prevalent in the early stages, whenever at some point we'll have a recurring revenue source. You know, we want to make sure we're not just blowing everything every single year and we have zero at the end of each fiscal year. So that would be worth considering. Only a couple more things. And, again, ideally, as this is implemented and eventually it grows, we get more LIHTC applications. I'm not aware of any, at least none currently, LIHTC applications that we have.

I'm not even sure when in recent memory we've really had one, if at all. I mean, I think the Beacon Landing project used LIHTC credits. Correct. I think Westwood had LIHTC credits, but that's a long time ago. And that was a very unique project with a PSH factor and nonprofits and all that. Yes. The only other question I have, which is kind of multifaceted, is really in terms of incentivizing housing development of a specific type. For example, the state will do bonuses for nonprofits, or as with the state they just passed the Faith and Housing Act, so even for church partners. Have we considered building in those bonuses or, for example, the states also doing more with workforce housing with that 80% to 120 AMI range?

Is that also being discussed or is this just too early? Yeah, there's not necessarily, I would say, bonuses built in per se. On the back end, when we're thinking about that committee that would be doing the selection process, we did create a scoring tool that would help guide their thought process a little bit further. So it does have some incentives for more deeply affordable units. That would potentially score higher, more affordable, more points awarded in the scoring process. But additional bonuses, that's not something that they had gone to that level of detail. Yeah, and again, I think for this is great, especially for the early stages, we start making this transition. But just want to highlight those items that we could consider for the future.

So thank you. Thank you. Council Member McCullough? Yes, thank you. Have we taken into consideration some of what we heard this evening during our public comment regarding a standardized timeline for the application process and first award cycle, transparent public reporting on scoring and outcomes and measurable performance metrics? Yes. So I think we would have a timeline. We would need to know if this is a process the council wants to move forward. But should that be something that the council is interested, we would certainly make sure that there's a transparent process. We do have the scoring criteria in the guidelines themselves. So that applicants would know what the city is looking for.

So those comments were certainly helpful and heard. And I think those are things that were perhaps already embedded in what has been developed. But absolutely appreciate that. Okay, great. I had another question about once the projects receive funding, what metrics will we as council receive to evaluate whether the program is achieving its intended outcome? We talked about following in internal conversations about the sort of accountability aspect of this, of establishing that in the award notification and the agreement that goes to the private provider, or the applicant rather, so that we would get information back to see, you know, what's being done with this project. I also think that with the housing trust fund,

we would want to highlight, this is another thing that was raised in the comment period, how many units are being built, you know, what has been done with the funding. I think all of that would come back to council in some manner, whether that's a weekly update or report out to council. But that information would certainly be shared. Okay, good. Yeah, I think it's important to be very specific about that, so that we're consistent across the board year after year as we review or look at these. And then when we discuss affordability, will there be, as far as the scoring, will there be a minimum expectation or preference for the length of affordability commitments to ensure that the investments provide a long-term community benefit?

Yes. Off the top of my head, I think a 30-year affordability period was referenced. But yes, absolutely. The long-term affordability has been considered in the process. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Councilmember Hall. Thank you. I think this question was sort of asked, but I just was hoping to take it from a different angle. Will the selection committee's recommendations and scoring be made public so that applicants and residents understand how the awards were made? Yeah, I think with the scoring criteria is listed in the guidelines. I think with the decisions themselves, I think I'm trying to think through the nonprofit grant. I think each applicant was notified whether or not their project was awarded.

And then there is feedback that's given to the applicants if interested, so that they understand where the criteria has, how that resulted in the decision. In the past, what I have done in other lines of work with federal funding for homeless services and competitions is I've, you know, taken all of the scores from each of the applicants, have averaged the scores so that you can provide feedback specifically around, you know, which section scored higher than other sections so they can see and understand some of the decisions that were made. But it's more of an aggregated result for the applicants. So I, you know, I think in that sense we would try to be as transparent as possible. Okay. Thank you.

And two other questions here. If a project were to receive funding, but ultimately isn't built or doesn't meet its affordability commitments that were agreed upon, what sort of mechanisms exist to recover the funds or redirect them to another project? I think that's where the collaboration with the city attorney comes in key. And we would have language built into the award notification that, that accounts for that. So if a project doesn't come to fruition or if it's not utilized for the purpose as intended, we would, we would work with legal staff. Okay. And then my last question is just kind of about geographic distribution throughout the city. Are there certain areas that are, you know, kind of right for something like this,

or is it more equal for everyone depending upon where they, you know, may purchase land or decide to do something like this? I mean, are there any preferences given to certain areas that already exist? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think we didn't cover location specifically in, in the guidelines of the application. I think that would be something that in future rounds, should there be more funding committed, that could be something that we looked at more closely, especially aligning with some of the small area plans and the activity centers and figuring out where development should occur. I think there could be considerations for either bonuses or something along those lines, but given the,

the, the dollar amount that we've got now, we, we didn't go to that level of detail. Thank you. Yeah. I agree that, you know, we, we have what we have now. And I think until we, or if we are able to establish a revenue opportunity for this, I think not that what you have done here is not going to work, but we might find that, you know, we might need a whole different system or approach to what we're doing. But I think for what we're trying to do with the existing funds that it remain in the housing trust fund, I think this is a really, really great effort at trying to make sure that they are utilized in the most appropriate way. So thank you for all that you've done for this. Sure. Council member Hardy Chandler.

So first, let me just reinforce that. I support this. My first question is somewhere. I think I saw where it was stated. This is not technically a fund. Can you explain that a little bit? Sure. At housing trust funds are usually, I think thought of for, in terms of developers as a reoccurring source. So something that they can be relied upon year after year, we have a finite amount. So once the 540,000 is utilized, we don't have a plan to commit any funding. So that's, that's the distinction that I've heard, but we still call it a housing trust fund because it's a little bit more complicated to say the proper agreements, the money that has come through from developers, that is just the housing trust fund is more succinct.

And so part B is what would be required sort of structurally to have it evolve into a fund. Yeah, I think committing the ongoing revenue, finding a way to do that. I think for developers that would signal that the, for the city of Fairfax, there's a consistent investment in affordable housing. So that might attract the type of affordable housing development that the city is looking for, because they know that they can rely on this. Anytime that a jurisdiction has a housing trust fund and developers are seeking to build affordable housing, they're leveraging that resource to apply for other funding. But the, the local investment sometimes allows that, that leverage to happen where otherwise it couldn't.

So I think that's, that's the distinction and it would be that committing of the ongoing revenue to. So it's not just the money. It's also the messaging to developers in terms of expectations and those kinds of things. Yeah. Okay. Something else occurred to me and I don't know if there's even an answer to this, but I'm really struck by when you were doing the context setting and talking about the top 10 occupations, not being able to live in the jurisdictions that they serve or something to that effect. Is there, first of all, thank you that there is a matrix available for weighing applications. I wonder if there's one of those categories that could touch on workforce or particularly those, or setting some,

again, I don't know if this is possible, but somehow giving weight to an arrangement or a plan that serves people who work in the city of Fairfax and giving them, you know, priority as part of the calculation. Is that something that's possible? I think anything's possible. I think. Oh, I love that phrase. Workforce housing, I think is a bit of a misnomer. Sometimes it's thought of as the, the above 80% to 120% AMI. But when you think about somebody that's working 40 hours a week, full time, that's earning minimum wage, that's more like 30% AMI. So I think that, that, that term can be a little bit tricky, but I, you know, there, there is work done within HCAB. There is a desire to align with the affordable housing streets,

you plan actions and to figure out the targets for affordable housing within the city. You know, how much do we need at 80% AMI? How much do we need at 120%? How much do we need at 60% and below? I think that's, that's coming. That's in the pipeline. Um, that is something that they're, they're working on. Um, I think that would also help. That would help set prioritizations for the disbursement of the housing trust fund. Mm-hmm. Yes. Because I think historically in various, very high, very expensive jurisdictions, hearing of, for example, teachers who are not able to live in the communities where they teach, firefighters who are not able to live in the communities where they're, you know, uh,

providing public safety. And so if there's anything, especially in this sort of, you know, burgeoning phase of this pre fund, if there's anything to, to be kind of, um, trailblazing in that respect, would love to support that or see that be a part of the evolution as well. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions, comments? Council member Peterson. On slide nine, you have a listing of eligible uses of funds, uh, eligible activities. They're called. There's a series there. Do you have a sense of which of those are greatest interest where the demand is? And also in terms of cost effectiveness, how should we understand the cost effectiveness of them? I think there is more known interest in affordable housing development for projects that have been approved just because those projects have specifically reached out.

They're aware that the city does have some housing trust fund or affordable housing dollars. Um, I don't know if we've heard from any projects regarding any preservation funds. So if there's any of the naturally occurring affordable housing projects that would be interested in pursuing this opportunity, I don't, I don't think we have a sense currently. Um, we, we know that we, we have interest from the, those that are in development. Are you expecting that data to emerge with implementation so that we'll then be able to plan around it a little bit more clearly? Yeah, I assume if this is a project that moves forward and a timeline is established and the opportunity is pushed out that we would certainly learn of where there is interest and see the volume of applications.

Is it five? Is it 10? We, we just, we wouldn't know yet. We wouldn't know the dollar amount that they're looking for. Um, so I think that process would, would help highlight that of what the need exists, what, what, how much interest there is currently. Okay. So we're really going through a discovery process here as a part of this. Do we have the, with the set of eligible activities? Is that a full suite? Is there anything missing from that that ought to be included as we go through this process of determining, you know, uh, what the level of interest and effectiveness is? I think there are more uses for a housing trust fund than what we have listed here for eligible activities. I think this process focused on development and preservation,

which, which does align with two of the three goals in the affordable housing strategic plan. We don't have the process for rental assistance. We don't have a process for first time home buyers assistance. And I think that was due to the fact that right now we're, we're talking about 500,000 and it, it just, it doesn't go very far. Um, we explored rental assistance and what that would look like when you consider the number of households that are renters and are cost burdened, which was mentioned in the, the, the stats at the beginning of the presentation. Even if you supported half of those households with a one time payment of $2,000. So half of the households being 600 one time payment of 2000,

which unfortunately might not even cover a full month's rent. That would be over a million dollars needed for just that one time support. Um, so we were trying to think about back to your question about what would be, you know, the greatest impact trying to think about what would be, what would generally, um, yeah, impact the most residents over a longer period of time. Great. Thanks so much. Council member Bates. I just want to say that, uh, I strongly support, uh, the establishment of this process and, uh, thank you for all your work. Thank you. I will echo that. This, this has been a long time coming and just, just to back up and give some history about, uh, the housing trust fund. It was cash in lieu is sort of the real estate term because we didn't have,

uh, set aside policy. We didn't have an ordinance that required developments like Mount Vineyard or the enclave to build affordable housing set asides. And so they gave us cash in lieu of building those, which is how we ended up with money in the bucket. And so when beacon landing came to us looking for investment by the city, which was necessary for their financing appeal, they had 23 separate sources of financing for beacon landing. It was necessary for this city because it's in our city. It was necessary for our city to invest so they could get the rest of the financing. And I just want to be clear on that because people don't go through life understanding how these things work. For many people,

the complaint was there was no application process, which was the whole Genesis of creating these guidelines in an application process. Why should beacon landing get it instead of somebody else getting it? And it was a unique process, but the money had also been sitting there for, I think, seven years. And the whole point of the cash in lieu was instead of providing affordable housing units, they were giving us money so we could use it to provide affordable housing units. So that $700,000 investment got us 54 of those units, which comes back to what you were saying as far as evaluating, what amount of money is going to get us the greatest return and have the greatest impact in our city? And so this actually turned out to be a good example of how that money was well invested to both get the financing necessary to build it

and the fact that it's in our city and it provides these 54 units. So we have $500,000 now. And I think we have to think in terms of until we say we have money available, a program, an application, a guideline, we don't know who's going to apply. And it seems like you have set up, HCAB, your committee has set up something that is looking at all the different ways that we could, for our small amount of money, invest to get the largest possible impact. And so separating this from whether we'll have in the future a recurring source of revenue to replenish our bucket is beside the point. I think right now we need to be focused on how best do we spend the $500,000 and how do we let people who have projects in our city know that this money is available.

Because just for Beacon Landing, that money was so critical for them to actually build that. And the impact has been so great, will be so great for our city. And I think a lot of this is how we think about it. It's not the amount. It's how we invest the amount and figure out how we can support people who are trying to build housing in our city for people who need it. And that might be service workers. And it might be people with very low AMI or people with disabilities. All kinds of people need housing in our city. So with that, I will say thank you very much. We appreciate everyone being here from your committee and we appreciate the presentation. Ms. Shinneberry. Well, before I announce, I just want to do a time check.

This is 1018. Okay. All right. So our last item is a follow-up discussion on city council code of ethics. I'm going to recognize Brian Lubkman, our city attorney for the staff report. Hello again, mayor and council. We have talked about this topic several times. Per your instructions on May 26th and our commitment, we drafted a city of Fairfax code of ethics. The staff report self-explanatory. It addresses issues of stewardship, public conduct and behavior, transparency, maintaining, ensuring public confidence, avoiding conflicts of interest, ensuring proper use of public resources, maintaining integrity and confidentiality where appropriate, loyalty to the locality and the mission. As I have this drafted,

it would be applicable in addition to the mayor and city council to the boards, commissions and committees appointed by the city council, obviously not to boards and committees that are not appointed by the city council, such as BZA, board of equalization. And there's some general language in there regarding enforcement as well, which is sort of best practice based on what we've seen in some other jurisdictions. So with that, happy to answer any questions. The guidance that I think we're looking for is whether you want to proceed with this, whether you in fact want it to apply to the boards and commissions, or whether you want to look at this further. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Questions? Questions? Council Member Peterson? We have talked about this, and I think my perspective is that it would be good for you to bring this back for action, and I gather in the fall. With respect to coverage with boards and commissions, would just like to know whether there's any reason that this shouldn't be a purely symmetrical process for them. And I don't know of any off the top of the head, but I do know that they may have just a different perspective in terms of people who come to serve in those capacities may have some different perspective here. You know, we need to take into consideration. But at any rate, I strongly encourage us to consider this further. Any other questions or comments?

Online? Anybody? Well, there we go. Oh, you got one. Which one? Council Member McQuillen. Yeah. Thank you. Yes. I, too, wish to support and move forward with a code of ethics, and think that it's important to also discuss applying it to the boards and commissions as well. Yeah. Mayor. Yes. Council Member Hall. Yeah. I am definitely in favor of this. I see no reason why it would not apply to the boards and commissions as well, and I think the sooner we implement this, the better. Council Member Bates. I do have a question. Would this apply to previous instances of, you know, discourse on the council or just going forward from when it's adopted? As with most codes of ethics, it's prospective in nature, not retrospective.

So it would be, once it's adopted, it would apply going forward. Okay. Thank you. Anything else? Council Member Amos. Thank you. I really only have one question, and I will send an email just a couple of typos. I got you. Yeah. I caught the typos. Yeah. Yeah. My only question is, if we were to apply this to boards and commissions, I'm assuming they haven't really had any input on this at all. That's correct. So I would like to at least garner some input kind of to a little bit of Council Member Peterson's point, if we are going to apply this to boards and commissions, to get some feedback from them if they're interested. And it may be that there's none, but I think it's at least worth asking.

So the suggestion I would have is, if we're thinking about maybe bringing this back right after the break, that gives us a little time to reach out at least to the chairs of the boards and commissions and see if they want to explore this further or whether it's a, I'm trying to find the right legal term, nothing burger for them. So. That sounds like a good suggestion, Council Member Amos. Okay. Council Member McQuillan and then Council Member Hall. I'm just confused as to why we would do that, Council Member Amos. Is that because we're allowing boards and commissions to make the decisions regarding their own ethical, like, adoption of what they're going to do? Or we're just, is we, we're just going to give them a vote on everything?

Or is this, the council is going to move forward and make decisions based off of what we're doing here? Council Member Amos. It's just to make sure that we follow a process where we're not telling boards and commissions how they should operate. I, I think a code of ethics is perfectly fine and the draft as is. I don't really have any issues with it. Um, but you know, we've made a big deal about trying to recognize the importance of boards and commissions. I think we need to make sure that we apply that unilaterally, not selectively. But they don't have unilateral power based off of our charter. This isn't about power. So I'm just confused as to why you're wanting. It's just confusing to me what you,

what the outcome is going to be. Just garnering input. Okay. Thank you. Council member Hall. Thank you. Um, I don't think we need any more cooks in the kitchen. I think we've got six, uh, council members up here plus the mayor, plus an attorney, plus a city manager, two assistant city managers. I think this has been very well vetted. Um, I think we were the ones that asked for this as a council, and I see no reason why we shouldn't move forward with it. If there is concern over the boards and commissions, then I think that would be something that we would potentially, um, you know, push out a little bit later, but I really don't understand why we would not, um, do this. I mean, I will also say,

you know, when I, I'm doing my HR role for my company and I come up with a employee handbook or, you know, other things, you know, we don't post it around for everybody to have a say on it. You know, we have a couple people that are in key roles that participate and help, but I, I just, I think if you're trying to have every single board and commission look at it and give their feedback, I think that that is going to just be a, an unnecessary delay of time. Um, but I would certainly focus on getting this implemented for council and mayor effective immediately. And then if you wanted to pursue that further, I would be happy to talk about that further. Council member Hardy Chandler. I agree with the suggestion for input.

I mean, we talk about community input in a wide array of areas and their members of the community, and it's going to apply to them. I also think if it's going to apply to them, they should just have notice about, uh, that being instituted. So I see no problem with, for those who are going to be held, to that code, having their eyes on it. And I think we can frame their input so that they're not wordsmithing every provision, but generally talking about whether or not they feel that that is something that, um, will help their commissions because, um, you know, they will be held to it. So I support their feedback and their input as members of, uh, the community, their voice, but also as people who will,

that code will be under, or they will be under that code. Council member Amos. Also, I mean, just based off of what we were discussing, there also wouldn't be any disruption to the timeline as is. If we're talking about this after the break, then we would get the feedback by the time that we would, if we're implementing this just for council. So there is no change to the timeline. It's kind of my understanding, at least on how we will, the timeline we want to implement this. Council member Bates. I just, uh, want to say that I strongly agree with that. I think it sounds like a great idea. Well, it's, it sounds like we've got people who want to, and people who don't. I support sending something out to the boards and commissions to say,

this is what has been put together. It's for your review. And barring any feedback, we are going to move forward to the adoption process. But I do think sending it out and asking for their review and input by a certain deadline, and if we hear nothing from no one, then we simply move forward to adoption because it sounds like people do not have a problem with what has been presented. So if I'm hearing correctly, what I will do is, or what we will do is we'll place this on for the first regular meeting in September for consideration of approval. Um, I will, uh, with the city clerk, we'll send this out to the chairs of the boards and commissions and ask if they have any input, uh, other than wordsmithing.

And, uh, whatever input we get, we'll report back when we have this on for consideration. I, I think that certainly the transparent way to garner engagement from people who are operating under the proposed code of ethics. Council member Peterson. Yeah. Just to maybe be clear on one part of that. Um, I think I would not be in favor of a process that enables, um, feedback from a board or commission to block the consideration of this by the council. Your boards and commissions have, uh, and I'm, I'm not going to make this sound the way it sounds. Your boards and commissions have no authority about what you all decide here up and decide up here in the dais. Uh, so whatever input, any, if not, you can take it,

disregard it, do whatever you'd like with it. Uh, we'll just simply report it to the extent there is anything. And I will say, given the break, I'm not sure we'll get a lot of feedback. And the other issue is if you look at the code of ethics, um, um, I would, I would be concerned if we got pushback on any of those provisions. They're mostly aspirational. Well, I'm just responding to, and it may just be a word thing here that it was stated that if we don't hear anything back from the boards and commissions, we'll proceed. I'd like to be clear that we would proceed, um, regardless. It will be on the agenda for your consideration. The first regular meeting in September. Thank you. Any other discussion here?

Council member hall. Uh, yes. Yeah. Thank you. Um, I, I just want to say, I think what's, what's good for the goose is good for the gander or whatever that phrase is. If we, as a council are in favor of moving forward, this for council, then let's do it. And if boards and commissions have questions or concerns, that to me can be addressed in what version they get put forth. But I, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't move forward with this version for council. We all seem to be in agreement on it. And I don't think any sort of delay in having others review it should stop council from implementing a code of ethics and standards for council. And I'm, I'm hearing your feedback and we have three council members who want to proceed

without this step. And there's three who want to proceed with the step. So I think given that there's three and three that, that I'm going to put my support behind taking a step that does not delay our considering this on September 1st. I think it is a good faith measure to send something out to boards and commissions when we are going to apply this code of ethics to them and their volunteer members. I think that's acting in good faith. It does not, it does not one iota delay what we're doing here. It is simply being inclusive in getting feedback if they choose to review it. And they may not. And just to clarify something you just said, it'd be September the 8th, not the first, the first work session.

September the 8th. Thank you. So there's no delay to voting on this or implementing this or taking action on this. We are doing a step that says we are asking for the people who will operate under this proposed code of ethics to review it and give them the opportunity to give us feedback. It does not impact what we, the council do with it. So I'm going to say yes. Council member. McQuillen. I'm comfortable with all of that. I am always in support of more information. That's fine. I don't personally, I don't, I don't care either way as far as, as long as it doesn't delay the progress of moving forward with it. I'm totally okay with, you know, getting more information. I'm always on board with that.

Great. It seems like we have a decision that we can move forward. Thank you so much, Mr. Luckman. Ms. Shinneberry. For you to recess the, oh, right. I am now going to recess this work session and reconvene the regular meeting so we can go to future meeting topics. Mr. Dan Alexander. All right. Thank you, mayor and council. Looking to the future and our next meeting on the 28th, we have a consideration of a contract for award for an owner's rep for school construction projects. They'll be coming to you. Public hearing and council action on the potential zoning tax amendments regarding detached accessory dwelling units. We have a work session scheduled for pre-application for 3541 chain bridge

road that proposed redevelopment of office space to a mixed use development of townhouses and retail uses of discussion on a land use application. Courthouse plaza combined courthouse LSC applicant, at the addresses listed there. I will say that I'll address some of these work session items that involve land use and a little more detail as we get through this. Um, and also based on communication that I've sent to you earlier today, uh, that takes us to the break looking ahead. As we indicated September one would be, uh, our first early work session starting at 4 PM. So you see a full slate of items listed there to include some pre-application briefings on developments. We have at that same time,

a discussion of the level of service and dynamic capital impact model. Uh, we will be bringing to you, and this is a change, uh, discussion of our 20, 27 legislative program. We're trying to get a little bit ahead of that based on the compressed next session and expectation from our, um, electeds. So we'll be bringing that to you in September to start that discussion. We will have a discussion that result in a consent item in the next meeting on resolution for the reappropriation of operating capital and enterprise funds that are carryovers to 20, 27. 21. That will be coming. Uh, and then looking to the eighth, uh, we have, and you've seen this before consideration of award for construction contract for university drive bike lanes,

and then the resolution to cancel, uh, the intersection improvements at university drive that are on here. Uh, also, as I mentioned, you would see the resolution for reappropriation and that takes us through the eighth. And I think of note, I will say on the 22nd, which we have mentioned to you in an email, you have a redevelopment coming for public hearing, uh, Highlands at Mantua, 14 townhouses. Uh, and then if needed, a, a, council action on resolution for re for reappropriation coming. So that took you all the way through September at this point. As I mentioned to you earlier, um, I think because we have significant items coming from the, significant items coming to you on the 28th. And there've been some questions about,

uh, development and how we're handling this process. I want to spend a little bit of time, uh, talking a little bit about process. Um, Brooke, I'm going to call you up early, uh, because I think you might have some questions for him. And it may not be a little bit back and forth. I think it's important. We at least have a discussion on this since we are not going to have anything before the 28th. And so, you know, in terms of process, we want to be very clear. Also say that, uh, I think over the last several years, we've talked about this a minimum of what do we say, Brooke, 10 times, 10 times. So this is an issue that comes up from time to time. And it's certainly understandable that, um, there,

there are some concern, questions and interests, uh, regarding this. Generally, as we talk about, you know, our process and the work session process for pre-application briefings, our intent is to introduce the early concepts, identify the principle planning and policy considerations as we go forward. Yeah. Counsel has an opportunity to ask questions and identify issues. The applicant is generally present to answer questions. This is the pre-application part of this understanding that in most of the jurisdictions, we look at this process is somewhat unique in that we have to be able to, uh, we have a pre-application and then a post-application. So we get counsel and earlier looked in most places as it relates to many of,

of these projects. Now, as you all know, um, we present preliminary analysis, the post-application work session. The applicant actually presents and explains proposal. We just saw that. So that's pretty clear on that. And then the staff and applicant received feedback as part of that, that process. So I think it was important to lay out that framework to kind of understand, you know, how those two pieces work. Again, we're getting more of a look at their early end of this, understanding that as council getting that look, right. So that pretty much lays out. I'm gonna turn to you to make sure I'm on the right court. So I know we're pressed for time. So we've talked about the fact that, um, um,

we have competing concerns about these, how these processes run. Um, so really what we're looking for is to get, you know, clearer expectations on, on what we're doing. One of the things I was mentioned is a time limit on applicant post-application presentation. Uh, we have, I'm not picking on anyone particular, uh, but what applicants come in and do 30, 40 slides for an extended period of time. So one of the things I've heard is, is maybe shrinking that down a little bit, right. Um, and making that more reasonable, putting a cap on with some degree of flexibility, uh, on that process. So the idea is to get you information, not to make a pitch for, you know, a particular project. again, not picking on anyone particular,

but clearly that's the intent behind that. Right. Um, I think from there I've also heard, and you know, and this is something that I've seen in other places, a structured round of questions from council members. I mentioned that in the email today, two rounds, and then we move into a broader discussion. Once we have it, I'm not suggesting any limits on that. Some places do that. It's, it's for your own consideration as to how you would want to do that. Uh, then clearly a sharper focus on the work session. And the actual analysis and what are the, the trade offs that we're talking about and what are the exact follow ups that we need to bring back to you, uh, as we move forward. So those are the things that we have talked about and have taken into

consideration that does not get into staff analysis. I'm going to touch on that next. Cause I know we've had concerns about the degree and, and, and staff analysis content. How does that sound up to this point to councils relates to process comments on process council, council member Peterson. Uh, thanks for doing that. And I think it's really important. And for everybody who's listening, there's a very big difference between the conversations we have at the pre-application phase and the post-application phase. And appreciate you noting that it's a bit unique what we do in pre-application. My understanding is that we do pre-application. I think the intention was, uh, to get early, early feedback,

um, that would help guide, uh, design decisions, uh, in particular. So conceptually that is a good idea. If you are doing, you know, what we call co-design. It's a practical matter. I don't think that's how this process is set up. It has not worked that way. This is, has been, I think, um, has become unfair to the community and unfair to the council in terms of how this has happened because the pre-application process enables an applicant to come in, um, and advocate for their position. Uh, the job of the council is to ensure that decisions we're making represent the community interest. And yet we do not have members of the community present to be able to express their interest. And they oftentimes are competing here.

So that leaves us in a difficult position. Uh, the other thing is, um, we don't have the requisite analysis, uh, at that stage to be able to, uh, determine where there are trade-offs that would influence design and direction. Uh, we don't have net, net tax impact assessments, for instance, but there are a whole series of things. And to rely upon the advocate to provide them, I don't think is wise or particularly functional. So I am concerned about, again, the lack of, um, a community presence there. So that we are hearing from interested and affected parties in the community. Uh, and we are here to represent their interests. And then at the same time, um, having insufficient information, uh,

uh, and being in a position of having to query an applicant about statements they're making without really the ability to validate that or verify that. And so I think those have, have really, um, impaired this process and need to be addressed in some way. Um, you know, two issues that you hit on that are kind of second and third on my list is analysis and engagement. So, um, um, which I think it all infused at every step of the way. So certainly would, would suggest that those are important. Essentially from a staff analysis standpoint, the type of things that we're looking at, and a lot of this depends on the type nature and scale of what we're looking at. Ultimately, comprehensive plan consistency,

small area plan consistency, applicable benchmarks and requested deviations, transportation and access, public safety, schools, utilities, and infrastructure, stormwater, environmental and tree canopy impacts, architecture, and urban design, economic development, considerations, fiscal and public service impacts, commercial and land use trade offs, community benefits, the factual basis for material claims made in support of the application and the overall benefits impacts and policy trade offs associated with a given request. So not every category, and it was important for people to understand, I think what we're looking at from an analysis standpoint, but not every category is going to be applied the same way in every application.

And the depth of analysis may be dependent on the approval criteria and then the circumstances surrounding a given proposal. Did I leave anything out that's worth mentioning? And so, again, from a council perspective, are these the areas that you believe we ought to be looking at? Is there information from this that you feel like we're missing as we move forward into, you know, this next round of applications, pre-applications? Well, let me call on council member hall. Thank you very much. Um, so I, I think I had a slightly different interpretation of how the pre-application meeting was supposed to go last week. I thought like kind of went totally off the rails. Um, so the way it was previously was that staff presented it. They gave us a

staff presented it. They gave us the information that they had and the applicant either didn't show up or sat there and wasn't able to say a word. And a couple times I've, I've seen. The applicants sit there and they're like shaking their head when staff is saying yes about something because they know that that's not the correct answer about their problem. So the intention that this council set up when we allowed the developers to be present in the pre-application meeting was simply for them to be present, to answer questions that staff was not able to answer. Um, and I think that that has worked well. What I feel like happened this past week. I mean, I was shocked to get a presentation from the developer the day of, and the whole thing was just, it, it, it didn't seem like it followed at all what was supposed to happen. Um, and you know, we hadn't had a pre-application in a while.

So maybe we were a bit rusty and had kind of forgotten what we had agreed upon, but what happened last week, I think should, should not be allowed to happen again. Um, I don't think that's the goal of those pre-application meetings. I do also share the concerns that there's not enough information provided at the time, but I don't think that we're going to get around that unless we completely eliminate the pre-application, um, meeting. And I think that there is certainly some value in the meeting itself, but. I don't see that we should be giving an opportunity for developers to, you know, come and just share everything they want to share. That's not that goal. Yeah, I think, I think, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that that was a post-application. I think we had done a pre-application on that one.

That's correct. Now, I think to your point in terms of the scope and how that was laid out, even from a post-application standpoint, there's way for us to refine that and distill that down and make that a little better balanced. The goal is still for us to get you all the information that you need, specific data that you need to make decisions. And so it certainly, um, I think, you know, is important for us to, to ensure that, uh, we're using our time wisely, um, and that, that we're balancing this out in terms of the input that you're receiving. Okay. I'm sorry to jump in just to clarify. So the meeting that we had last week was a post-application meeting, not a pre-application meeting. That's correct.

That's correct. For the, for the gallery project, that was, that's an application that's under review. So that was a, a post submission work session. Okay. So that's why they were able to give, okay, my, my mistake on that one. Um, okay. But I do think it's good. We're having the clarifying conversations, but again, I do think it's, you know, I, I know we're not, you know, legally allowed to make a decision on whether we move forward with a project because it's going to, as seen sometimes on staff reports, either generate 300 $300,000 or lose $300,000. But I do also feel like that's really valuable information. Um, and it's not that we necessarily deny a project and move forward with a project simply because there's an incentive financially or cost financially, but that's all part of the package. Right. And I also would strongly encourage that we get staff numbers on things and that staff jumps in and corrects the development.

And I think that's, um, I think that's a really important part of that. And I know that's probably a really hard spot for staff to be in to be correcting a developer, but I still think it needs to be done. Thank you. I think there's a, a important point you made earlier, and it goes to the notion again, that we have to recognize what phase we're in and the degree that we have information regarding the project and the changes. And the changes that need to be made. So when we talk pre application or even post application, um, all the, all the analysis isn't in, so to speak, and we've not received, you know, all the input that we need to receive, um, and done all the analysis we need to do. So I think there's certainly, um, some limitations with, with doing this process, the way that we're doing it and misconceptions about how detailed information we're going to have at the time.

Um, I would say that, you know, engagement was brought up and I'll go through it very quickly in terms of, you know, the community and, and their, and what they're getting. Obviously, you know, we have the pre application and there's limited information that's that's available at that time. Um, at that time though, we do start the process of establishing these project pages and putting items, uh, out for the public to see. So residents can provide comments directly to staff and council throughout the review, including email written correspondence or online comments in our portal that we maintain. And then those comments are shared with council as part of the public record. The key aspect of this is to remember that this is an application that's coming to us as part of a public process and, and involves items that will be a public record and be part of a process and applicant making application to us and going through, again, a process where, um, everything is heard and everything's maintained for the public record.

Um, the applicants may conduct community or neighborhood meetings. That's something that Brooke and I talked about earlier is that office. It's often it's incumbent upon them to do that community outreach and explain their application to council as, as we go through this process. Um, and so that is something that is a responsibility. They're planning commission conducts their public hearings when applicable. And then obviously the council conducts a public hearing before final action. So wanted to be clear to, uh, both Austin community that that's typically, you know, where we go on, uh, engagement. So, you know, I wanted to cover analysis and engagement. I know there may have been some other input that you may have had relative to that, but I want to be clear on that.

I think council member Bates had a question or comment. Yeah. Um, I, I just wanted to say with regard to pre-application briefings, um, I would think that with regard to the pre-application briefings, um, with regard to, uh, transparency and community outreach, that it's something that we would want to preserve exactly for those reasons. Because it provides us a means of making the community aware early on of not only what's coming before us possibly in the near future, but also what our early feedback is on that project. Um, and it also perhaps saves the developer some time and money if, uh, some of us, as has happened before, um, don't really like the project that they're bringing to us as opposed to going through the, you know, the process drawing up designs, et cetera.

But, um, as with any, uh, work session item, the presentations are posted ahead of time, the staff presentations and, uh, that I believe I recall even receiving feedback from community members that was spurred on by the, uh, pre-application materials. And, uh, so I don't think that that's something I would support getting rid of getting rid of? Trustee Jerry Cook- Council Member Petersen? Trustee Jerry Cook- So the list that you read in terms of analysis items was, I think, inclusive with the exception that I'm not sure it necessarily included an understanding of offsite impacts and interactions, particularly with adjacent properties. This has come up before and it's been a real disadvantage to not have that information

because there are interactions that take place offsite. I don't think it is merely the responsibility of the council to identify those. I think we need the support from the staff and the community needs to be involved in that. From a feedback perspective, and I think the other way to think about this is what we call co-design, which is trying to work together to find these design configurations that will meet the different objectives that we have. You know, there's public and private objectives coming together here. That is very difficult to do when you separate in time and space people who need to be involved in that. This is a live environment with Q&A. Significant new information comes about during that live discussion.

When the community is absent and unable to comment at that time, it robs you of a critical point in time when you should be getting joint thinking and joint feedback going. So separating and saying people can comment later, earlier, whatever, is very different from having some form of joint communication and dialogue there. The other thing that I think we've tried to raise but we need to find a better way to do it that gets to the question mark of how best to design these things is design processes rely on options and looking at different options and finding which of those options satisfy these different objectives best. It is very typical that an initial option, no matter who proposes it, doesn't do that adequately

and has to go back to the drawing board. But the whole process of figuring out what works typically involves a process of looking at different options, different ways something may proceed. What I think I've experienced in these conversations is us attempting to understand why the option before us is the only option before us and why others weren't considered. I think it's a fair question because I think there are other ways that these objectives could come together better. But we do not have an avenue, as I've seen it during these conversations, to see that suite of options and be able to understand the implications of them and how that might come together in terms of a better way forward. Yeah, I think, you know, a couple of things that and I may miss a few of your points.

You know, the one element and I'll ask Brooke to chime in on impact and kind of adjacent impact and how it's relevant to that. I think we would have to define something in terms of public input that meets the criteria of an applicant, an application and public hearing. And so we'd have to figure out that element of it in some way in order to capture that. I'm not exactly sure what that might be, but certainly something that we could look at. And then I think that, you know, you want to hit on the impact and the adjacent impact. Sure. And, you know, acknowledging that at a pre-application phase, typically what staff and what the Planning Commission, the City Council are proposed with is a sketch.

It's a rough drawing. It's an idea as to what this proposal may look like. And the idea is to get some feedback at that level without fully understanding perhaps all of the infrastructure needs, you know, what adjacent issues may exist. Those are certainly things that when they're very apparent are raised at that point in time. But there may be things like, you know, a run of a utility line and where that needs to connect to offsite. And those things usually aren't known until the plans have advanced further. And so at that stage, at the pre-application stage, that's not something that is always going to be aware. As the project moves forward and more detail is provided, those are things that staff reviews,

that staff would make comments on in the comment letter, that would come to the Council during work sessions, and the Council could provide feedback on those as well. But it will, you know, the application process as it's designed, we won't have all the answers at the outset. The idea with pre-application, just to give some context, typically the way development projects come into a city or county, they come to the mayor or they come to the member of the Board of Supervisors that represents the district in which the project is in. Very different model than what we have here in the city. So the pre-application process was intended to make sure that there's information that's being shared among the Council,

that everyone on the Council has privy to that, and it's not being held by one that is in a particular role or someone who may know the developer. And so there's conversations going on. And so that process allowed for that information to be shared. A benefit of it was the public awareness. And so, unlike its typical project may simmer for months, kind of behind closed doors, what's been done with the pre-application process is, if a project in concept comes to the city's development review team, typically within a month's time of that, it can be on a Planning Commission agenda or a Council agenda. So, as appropriate, it's in a public meeting. It's being broadcast. The image that you see every time as presentations are made with the flow chart and the three columns,

this is where we are in the process. That states after the pre-application briefing, developer, you need to go out and engage with the community, and you need to engage with the community throughout. And so that information was brought to light and the community was aware of these concepts long before perhaps even an application was filed. So, certainly incomplete information, but it ensured that everyone had the information and there was time for that community engagement piece. What we found previously was that the developer carried the narrative because the developer was the only one in all the meetings. And so this allowed for cleaner information sharing, put the city in a stronger position to be able to consistently articulate the city's position as opposed to have the developer kind of picking and choosing what they wanted to hear

and how they created the narrative as the project moved forward. And so that was certainly a big consideration in the process and it can morph and change. And as the Senate manager noted, it has over time and certainly can continue to. But just a little context of kind of where things were and what may be typical other places and how this process evolves. I might just follow up. I certainly think this has been well intended and certainly hear you on that. On the sketch side, I think it's worth considering having more than one sketch available or communicating with developers that until you reach the stage of some convergence, I think it's the wisdom is to be able to look at different sketches before you get too far down the pike.

Where exactly that happens, I'm not sure, except that functionally what has happened, I think, has been by the time we see it, we're past the point at which options are being considered more broadly. We've really got one option and that's a fundamentally awkward position to be in. So I would be interested in us being able to be involved and understanding the broader set of options before we get put in a position where we're being asked to give feedback on just one option. And as a practical matter, there's resistance to consideration of other options that we experience during these conversations. That's fundamentally awkward because it gets to the fact-finding issues and those sorts of things. And I don't think that's the right way to deal with them.

Again, I think this is very well intended. The practical result of this has been a little bit awkward. Yeah, I think one of the concerns and I think it's something obvious here to a certain extent is it's largely the developer's application. And so they're bringing us a proposal in a lot of ways that they're presenting to us and we're being responsive in essence to that proposal and making recommendations using data, providing feedback, but largely it's predicated on that. Now to agree that, you know, may just need to understand what you mean by options, right? And understanding, you know, how that works within the context of an application. Thank you. I think we're going to go to Council Member Amos and then to Council Member Hardy Chandler.

Council Member Amos. Thank you. Not to add too much. I think Brooke did an excellent job summarizing as well as the city manager. Just a couple of things to point out. A lot of this also when it comes to process and again, just putting my developer hat on, pre-application is something I don't deal with anywhere else except for here. So it's definitely more of a unique process and I think the point of it is to be high level and do that upfront analysis and community engagement as I've already cited. And again, this is something that most other jurisdictions do not do. A lot of the process and frustrations that I've heard honestly usually come down to who owns the land. And just realistically, if someone privately owns the land, it is their choice on what they submit and what they bring to us.

We cannot really control that. The pre-application is a way for us to try to have input early on and send them back to the drawing board if needed. But it's not like we own land and can issue an RFP like the county does and they can just choose what they want. So we have to work within realistic boundaries and that's part of the reason why I wish we had done the real estate development course. I get it. But there's also pre-development costs. And the goal for most developers is to keep that as low as possible upfront because realistically, everyone thinks that developers have an excess amount of capital. The market is tight. That is not true. We try to mitigate how much we spend upfront because business development cannot be the reason why we can't pencil a deal.

And so we have to make sure we mitigate that early on. And again, the point of this is to be high level. I actually, I do agree that, you know, keeping the application presentations, if there are any shorter, I, we had a conversation about that doing that for staff last year. It should 100% apply to applicants if we do it for staff. And going back to one of the points you brought up on structured round of questions, I completely support that. I think giving everyone two to three and then we just can, then we can continuously go around that way. Everyone gets input early on in the conversation and maybe we ask similar questions or we can build off of one another. That can be helpful. And the only other thing I'll point out is in terms of timeline, let's say they go through a pre-application process and then they work with staff.

They have the reviews and the post submission and eventually they get to public hearing. They're not only dealing with the community members for a couple of years, they're dealing usually with at least two different councils. And so in terms of what you're looking at and the review process, it's probably more extensive here than you would see in many other jurisdictions. Council Member Hardy Chandler. Council Member Hardy Chandler. So I want to thank you, Council Member Amos, for that other perspective. Because I do think we need to look at this holistically. Brooke, I want to thank you for your very clear explanation. I promise you if we started this process later, as in just at the application or post-application space, we would then go, why don't we know this earlier, right?

And so then a council would want to reinstitute the pre-application phase because there will always be that desire to know more earlier. So we have a process now, as unique as it is, to have this be a little bit more iterative. It's on us to be able to hold that sort of ambiguity in the beginning of a project and know that it has to progress through certain stages for the reasons that Council Member Amos talked about, but because that's a process. And trying to be inclusive with the information, I definitely appreciate that. The other thing is that when that is available to Council Member Bates' point, there is notice to the public and there is, you know, that information being shared. So my final thank you is to the city manager for going through that process and sort of reminding us of those parameters.

I think that could, if we are listening to you, that could help us really make optimal use of these presentations appropriate to the stage where the projects are. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I do think that there is absolute value in pre-application discussions. And, again, I think it, in terms of looking at other possibilities, I believe that it's on us, our responsibility as Council, to be aware of the projects that are in the pipeline and to have kind of a sense of the landscape, to get that information that staff has generously offered a time and again for us to know what's going on, but to put that burden on a developer to then know what other developers are doing. I don't, I don't see that being plausible, but also I do think, again, the, the, the viewpoint of what's coming down the pike, what's already been approved.

That's for us to remember. And when we're presented with a presentation to put it in that context. So I appreciate the discussion and thank you very much. Okay. I think we've covered that. Do we feel like we've covered that? Yeah, I think we'll just quickly let you know the level of service is coming your way. Okay. That sounds so great. What else you got for us? That's, that's enough, Mayor. Thank you. Okay. Council Member Amos. I had one quick question. It is not process related. My only question for the 28th with 3541 Chambridge Road, and this may just be a question to ask via email. Is Wendy going to be available to kind of speak on maybe the, the Chambridge-Eton traffic? I mean, I know, again, it's a pre-application.

We literally just talked about this. Or have, provide some kind of preliminary feedback on whether this, I'm assuming this wasn't factored in because this just came up. But. Are you looking for a specific data? I guess just the context of this project with the timeline of, of when that project's supposed to be underway. Just because it's adjacent to it. Yeah. Why don't, why don't we get. Not that she has to be here. Maybe she can just send something via email. Just her preliminary thoughts on it. We'll, we'll get you all a message on what's happening with that project. Good thought. Council Member Peterson. I believe our city clerk and our city attorney were going to come back and visit us at some point to give us a little update on how things are going with the board and commission handbook and training and all that.

That'd be great if you could do that at whatever point you are ready. Yep. We can come back after recess. Super. Great. Anything else from the city manager? Okay. Then we'll just go to council comments. I'm going to start online with council member McQuillan. No comments. Thank you. Uh, comments. Council member. Hall. I just want to thank everyone for your patience, uh, this past 10 days or so, um, with my trip out to California and with my last minute requests to participate virtually. It's very much appreciated, um, during this time with my dad. So thank you so much. Um, no other comments from me. Council member Amos. No comments. Council member Hardy Chandler. No comments. Council member Peterson.

No, thanks. Council member Bates. Just want to, uh, thank our staff for wonderful 4th of July celebration, despite the heat. Uh, but also important that we prioritized or that, um, the safety of our staff and our residents was prioritized. Thank you. And I would just echo that sentiment. I think, um, the city manager made an excellent decision in deciding to cancel the 4th of July parade. Equally, the decision to move forward with the fireworks worked out incredibly well. There were a lot of wet people at Fairfax High School, but they were happy wet people. And the band was great. The fireworks were great. And so it ended up being, um, a 4th of July that showcased the resilience of our community

when faced with the unexpected. We made good decisions and it all worked out in the end and everyone was safe. And that truly was the whole point. And with that, I am going to adjourn the meeting at 11, 10 p.m. on Tuesday. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.