City Council Meeting

Paul NavteestaffThank you, Mayor Reed and members of City Council. As a quick reminder, the purpose of this project is to align the zoning ordinance better with our adopted small area plans and generally improve the review process for development and activity centers. I'm here with Justin Wallace and Mark White of White Smith and Casino Planning and Law. This is our consultant that's been working with us on this project, as well as Anna Safford, the city's urban forest manager. A quick review of the process for this project. This began in mid-2024. The first phase of this effort involved our consultant doing background research, looking at our existing zoning ordinance, and interviewing different stakeholders to discover what types of issues we're facing when

Justin WallaceThe purpose of the development frontage is to strengthen the building's relationship to the streets and enhance the pedestrian experience in activity center areas to allow more flexible design outcomes and more nuance at the street. We also felt that given the city of Fairfax already has design guidelines that get into detail that the development frontages was a strategic way to incorporate placemaking within the zoning ordinance. The small area plans envision more creativity, variation, flexibility in development. That's a plan to occur in activity centers. And so the development frontages is a way to promote placemaking and active ground floor frontage. So when we talk about development frontages, that means the building and site components that occur at the front of properties and regulate the siting, location of buildings.

And we've assigned different development frontages using these maps that you see on the screen. So we have four different types of development frontages. flexible commercial open space and residential frontage the priority retail supports those core areas that are pedestrian focused in the small area plans when we think about restaurants retail and hospitality uses so there's high foot traffic areas the build to zone here is much closer to the the sidewalk and so it's much more narrow setback than the other frontages we've propose a flexible commercial frontage this would apply along the major commercial thoroughfares with retail use and those larger format stores that might have some parking associated with it

development wants to go higher or more dense they would have the community benefits program as an exchange for more height and density. I keep saying community benefits, but I'm going to describe what those are. One incentive-based provision that we have is for land assembly. And so this encourages assembly of smaller parcels or fragmented parcels. and the goal being that with larger parcels or more parcels more land you'll be able to develop in conformance with the small area plan so a better block structure structure and that's envisioned in the small area plans we've applied the land assembly an incentive to all small area plans except for Old Fairfax where you have small parcels and it's encouraged there so we're applying

it across all of the other areas and how it works there's a graduated scale that's tied to the amount of areas that's assembled and then there is a density bonus that is attached to the amount of acreage assembled so that's incentive provision, I'm going to go into two of the community benefits which we've included in the program. That includes open space and transportation infrastructure. These are the two programs that we heard the most about that had the most applicability across all of the small area plans. And they direct ‑‑ they relate directly to the public realm and within developments. So open space, that means parklets, mid-block passageways, transportation infrastructure includes new roadway connections and internal street networks. And so the idea

compared to each other. Some cost less, some cost more. That was another factor. And then another factor is, again, whether they could apply across all of the small area plans or were they singled out to one area versus another. And so we try to be intentional about including open space and transportation infrastructure. And so those are the two programs that are included included within the

Speaker 18I understand that too. It is a difficult read when you first look at it, and we understand that. Part of this is because the things that have a higher weighting are usually a lot more expensive to provide for the developer, or are there things that the city would be hard-pressed to unilaterally just demand that the developer provide? We really have to create an incentive. And where we started thinking about that was some of the small area plans that would show like a trail running through it. That's really a capital improvement program thing, but if a developer wants to invest the money and wants to make it public, something we couldn't demand that they do, because we're in Virginia, and as you heard, Virginia doesn't make it easy for us,

Thomas Petersonor is that yet to be done? And if it is yet to be done, that seems to me to be something that ought to be taken into consideration when we do this to find out what we're actually trying to accomplish numerically and whether these are the best mechanisms for doing that. Sort of feels like right now we're playing tennis without a net and we're not really sure that what we do is accomplishing some greater goal that we want and need to do. So I would just raise that for further consideration big picture oh yeah big picture the mention of June 2nd and a work session on small area plans I think is enormously important for the city we've discussed this before and recognized like other planning instruments

that we have in the city they are dated and things have changed quite significantly during the period of time in which they were created see a very different future than the past by all counts here. And so it would be, I think, really important to try to understand how those updates take place and capture the new realities that we're dealing with. And part of those realities are the community's concerns about things. And we've talked about some of what needs to be updated. Part of it's the drivers, the forecasts of growth, et cetera, that are within the small area plans. And those clearly have shifted. And they are already under consideration for updating by COG. There was a meeting this morning to take a look at the methodology by which the cooperative forecasts are formulated

and look at update methodologies for that. And that's partly driven by this recognition that we are living in a different world now, and we need to make sure that our estimates and our forecasts and our understandings and assumptions about the amount of growth we're trying to either accommodate or control are really reflective of new realities. So where that goes from my standpoint is the question mark of whether it is prudent to be cautious about how many of these zoning changes we adopt now before we've had a chance to take a look at the small area plans and see where those updates need to go. Because if we end up concluding that there are significant updates, that may have a material effect on some of these.

I know the last time we got together, it sounded like for some of it, it may not be sensitive, but I think it's a fair point nonetheless that if we're taking a look at the updates for the small area plans, we would be a little bit careful about locking in zoning amendments prior to that process because it could have some impact on the way we approach things here. It is going to raise issues of height and density, location, design, ratios, mixtures, all those kinds of things that are very fundamental. And I would include in that batch, for instance, some of the conceptual design that I think has got to get back on the table about thinking about some areas in terms of activity centers. And you think of Courthouse Plaza, the Old Town area, where one might think of that as a prime location for an activity center because of its proximity to Old Town.

I THINK THOSE ARE GOOD INDICATORS THAT IT'S VERY MUCH TIME FOR AN UPDATE. SO I WOULD, AGAIN, HOPE THAT WE WOULD BE CAUTIOUS ALONG THE WAY AND THAT WE WOULD BE SERIOUS ABOUT THE EXAMINATION OF THE SMALL AREA PLANS SOONER RATHER THAN LATER. THANKS.