Planning Commission Regular Meeting/Work Session

James FeatherGood evening. Welcome to the regularly scheduled meeting of the City of Fairfax Planning Commission for Monday, October 27th, 2025. We are a small group tonight, but we do have a quorum, so we will meet as scheduled. Our first order of business is the Pledge of Allegiance. Please join me. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Next order of business is discussion and adoption of the agenda. We have a relatively light agenda this evening, but we have an important topic on it related to our capital improvement program. Are there any comments on the agenda?

James FeatherOpposed? Passes unanimously. Thank you. I look forward to serving on that board again. I enjoyed my time on it. when I was able to serve previously. Next order of business, public hearings. We have none this evening, so we will recess our regular meeting, go into a work session, and this is a presentation to introduce to us the proposed capital improvement program review of the planning commission for the upcoming five-year period, FY 2027 to 2031. Mr. Napty has a report to bring us up to speed. Those of us who have been through it before, it's always good to have a refresher. And we have a new member, so we'll get you introduced to him. We have a short discussion about if and how we will want to approach the CIP.

NaptystaffThank you, Chair Feather and members of the Planning Commission. Each year, the Planning Commission reviews the Capital Improvement Program as presented in the City Code and makes a recommendation to City Council. This process typically occurs from November until January, and the presentation of recommendations is made to City Council in early February. And so the purpose of tonight's work session is to introduce you to the process. We do not have a draft capital improvement program yet that will be presented to you by the city's chief financial officer at your next meeting on November 10. But we don't believe that you will receive a copy of the capital improvement program before that. You will be the first ones to see it publicly.

so you won't have a chance to review it and so in advance of that we wanted to give you an outline of what is typically done so you can be thinking about what you should be looking for and considering as you as you hear that presentation next time and also in advance of that be thinking about the process you want to go through again we have a limited time frame to to review it and make your recommendations so be thinking about how we want to go about doing that and we'll give some examples of what we've done in the past there. So to start off, the first question is why the Planning Commission is involved in this review. And essentially, the way the Capital Improvement Program is set up is that it's a three-phase element

with the longest-term phase being the comprehensive plan, which the Planning Commission is responsible for, which typically has a 25- to 30-year time frame on it. Then at a slightly shorter period within the Capital Improvement Program, everything included is a five-year time period and then within that there is a one-year annual capital budget and that is what actually is adopted by the City Council in June with the rest of the budget and becomes the spending plan for the coming year on capital items. So you can see the Planning Commission rule is very important for your relationship to the comprehensive plan which is why we seek your thoughts to be presented to the city council i won't go over this in detail but this is

what you typically included in the in the capital improvement program report and it shows that the cycle for a capital project from initiation until construction and so some of the key things to to point out is that you'll notice in the top left where it says how a project is initiated One of the main items is the comprehensive plan. Essentially, everything that goes into the capital improvement program should either be specifically mentioned in the comprehensive plan or should be incorporated by reference in that a new capital project is seeking to achieve a more general goal of the comprehensive plan. And then, once those projects are initiated, the department who is responsible for it determines whether how to proceed, and that typically involves some kind of evaluation.

feasibility study, other analysis, and those types of things. And then through that, it's determined whether to propose it going forward to be included in the capital improvement program. And that's where the Planning Commission's role becomes involved, along with the City Council and the City Manager, in that we always have limited resources and we have to determine where our priorities are. And so the Planning Commission, again, looking through the lens of the comprehensive plan, can help identify what those priorities should be and help the City Council make those final decisions in the capital improvement program. I won't go through the rest of the items there. I'll get into more detail about what happens after.

It's really later in the process and not necessarily applicable to this discussion. So what you will see when you receive the capital improvement program, the way it used to be laid out is, for those who have been here in the past, is that the actual capital projects should be things that are focused on actual facilities, investments in physical infrastructure and those types of things. What has previously been included has also been things like repair and maintenance, vehicles, equipment, and those types of things. And they were broken up into separate sections. And so the Planning Commission really was told to just focus on certain items. But going into this year, the idea is that all of those other items will be removed and included just in the budget because they are not actual capital items.

and the intent there is to show or help guide the priority of each project as defined in the comprehensive plan so those are all tools or resources for you to think about with the review of the capital improvement program we also identify public facilities reviews as required by the code of Virginia so the The Code of Virginia says that any public facility before it is constructed should be demonstrated to be in conformance with the comprehensive plan or specifically identified in the comprehensive plan. And if not, the planning commission has to take a separate action to determine whether the planning commission believes that project is in conformance with the general nature of the comprehensive plan.

A couple of years ago, we started doing these to kind of catch up on some projects that came after the comprehensive plan was developed. We had a few to go through. But more recently, the city has been much more strict about aligning our project with the capital improvement program. Also, we just updated the comprehensive plan last year. And so I don't think there will be any of these this year, but we'll still keep our eye out for them. These can be identified by city staff or planning commissioners can identify them as well and request that we do a public facilities review. If we do a public facilities review of any particular project, our goal is to do that along the same schedule as a capital improvement program and hold a separate public hearing on that project at the same day that we hold a public hearing on the capital improvement program and do it just before.

The reason for that is if the Planning Commission is going to support the Capital Improvement Program, we need to show that the Planning Commission can support the projects that are in there. And if there are any projects that aren't, we need to take that action to show that we support them separately before we include it. Or that we don't, and then we make a recommendation not to include them. So it's a tight schedule. They're pretty high-level reviews, so it's not as intense as going through a land-use case or something like that. We try to identify them, and as soon as we get the Capital Improvement Program, and then we'll introduce them to you and decide if we want to go through the review or not.

So our schedule for this year, as I mentioned, we typically go from November through January. So tonight you're receiving your introduction to the process. We have no content to share on the capital improvement program tonight. That will come at your next meeting on November 10th when this will be presented by the city's chief financial officer. And then the draft CIP will be immediately posted the following day for the public to view. And people can start considering it. Council will also receive a presentation later that week. So then what happens from November 10 until January is largely up to the planning commission on how you want to determine the types of recommendations that you want to make to City

the coming years, and those types of things. So that's something else to consider. And when thinking about that, although we don't have the capital improvement program yet, we do know some of the larger projects that will be in there because they have been in there in past years. So the ones listed here should all be in the five-year cycle. Some will be in the coming year, the actual capital budget for next year, but some will be in the out years. So those will be less of a concern. But some of the big projects that we're aware of are renovations to the two elementary schools and a new roof at Fairfax High School. These are fairly new into the Kaplan Improvement Program and they are funded through a or approved through a bond after random that was voted on at the last election by city residents.

The Willow Sherwood Community Center has been underway for quite some time. This just received approval for special use permits, the zoning action at the recent city council meeting. The final funding has not been allocated yet though. So fire station three replacement has been in the capital improvement program for a while because, well, through a feasibility study of that station. So we've known it's out there, but now it's at the point where there are recommendations. And now the funding request is for the actual project to redevelop that fire station as opposed to just a study. It's similar to the property yard redevelopment that has been in the feasibility study phase for a couple of years.

is now at the point where they're starting to estimate how much it will cost to implement the recommendations of that study, so that will be showing up in the capital improvement program with

again, those are four big ones that we know of just because of their longer term history. There may be some others that pop up, but when we think about if there are other groups that we want to meet with or get in touch with or invite to our meetings, then these are some of the things to think about. So we want to provide also an example of what the Planning Commission's resolution to City Council was last year, just to give you an idea of the types of recommendations that were provided. And as a quick reminder, at this time, or in January of last year, it was acknowledged that we were facing some budget challenges, that there was going to be some competition for the resources, limited resources to fund the projects in the capital improvement program

Sure, yeah. So essentially, a capital improvement program or capital projects typically are facilities, construction-type projects, things that change the physical nature of the city. and historically our capital improvement program has bled into other things where there's more gray area for a variety of reasons and so these other sections have been included there historically but the Planning Commission has really tried to focus just on what we call the blue sections at that time because those are the actual capital projects those are the types of things that the comprehensive plan deals with the comprehensive plan doesn't get into maintenance vehicles and those types of things. And so that's really been the genesis of it. The city as a whole now is trying to

move into having the capital improvement program only focus on those capital projects and those other types of things now will be pushed into the general budget just as a general matter of practice. And I'm not an expert in finance, but we've been told that that's the preferred way of doing things, not necessarily dealing directly with the Planning Commission. yeah