Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) Meeting   11/14/2023

We're live now?

Okay, so we will go ahead and start this meeting now and it is 2.08.

I will call the meeting for November 14th, 2023 to order.

We need to establish a quorum.

Kurt Burkhart, here.

Marsha Joseph, here.

and I'd also like to mention that we do have other Albemarle County staff here.

We have Mr. Herrick, Andy Herrick is here and we also have Bart Svoboda and is Francis still here?

Yes, we do.

We still have Francis MacCall and Marsha Alley and we also have our wonderful attorney, James Bowling is here.

Okay, we have no one on Zoom.

There are no public hearings scheduled.

So we'll move on quickly to the first item on the agenda, which is approval of the minutes for August 1st, 2023.

Does anyone have any comments on the minutes?

Madam Chair, I'd just like to thank Ms. Alley for inserting what I had requested from the previous meeting.

It was done to my satisfaction.

I'd like to say that over the last few months, I think the minutes have improved.

It took a little while, I think, for Ms. Golden to sort of get the hang of how to consolidate them.

I think we're now at a good state with there's enough in them to document the meeting without going overboard.

Any further discussion on the minutes?

Okay, Ms. Alley, would you please call the roll?

Mr. Burkhart?

Aye.

Ms. Joseph?

Aye.

OK. We have approved our minutes of August 1st.

We will now move on to the old business.

And as you all know, we have talked about this before.

And I just wanted to get you up to speed as to what's been happening since the last time we spoke, is that Mr. Carrington and I have met with staff

and talked about what the process might be.

I have spoken with Mr.

Bowling and we came up with this list of reasons why it may be a good idea for us to ask for an alternate and these are something that I've heard from you guys, I've heard from and so we wrote them down and Mr. Carrington was able to amend them and we got information from staff about this too.

Now the other thing is if we go ahead and approve this, how do we present this?

And Mr.

Bowling states that it's a simple letter that we can send to the Board of Supervisors to ask if they would ask the Circuit Court to allow us to have an alternate.

That's correct.

And I guess with the comment that we just received from Mr.

Bowling, I would like to ask staff how they felt if there may be a simple sentence placed in the letter, if this is affirmed, that staff had no objection to this.

Good afternoon, Andy Herrick.

I'm the Deputy County Attorney.

I think that the way that would be presented is it would probably put on an agenda of the Board of Supervisors.

I don't think it would be on the consent agenda, because I think that staff would want the opportunity to present it with staff's own recommendations and analysis of the request.

So it's certainly something that, you know, staff can take the recommendations of the BZA to the board, but I think that staff would probably want to

Okay.

There's a procedural thing.

I think so.

I mean, so I think it would probably be routed to the clerk of the board of supervisors who is in charge of scheduling the matters that come before the board of supervisors.

Bart Svoboda, Zoning Administrator.

This is a new thing, right, for us as a locality.

So we haven't had this request from the board.

As staff, we're also not sure that the board would ask us for our opinion or what do we think, what are the budget implications, things like that that may happen.

They may just take it on the letter and schedule it.

So also part of that process is just to make sure that if there's an opportunity for us to discuss it, because we've talked about it here, but what we haven't done from the staff perspective is

is talking about budget implications and different things like that.

So I don't envision much of that, a large budget impact, but I don't know where the board is with that.

So with this being a first time request, the board may not ship it to staff for comment.

They may take it on their own.

If we insert staff into that letter, then we may be putting staff into the process either prematurely or not.

So there's different things we wanna let the board kind of make that decision on how they wanna go through with the process.

Mr. Rosenberg, we didn't talk about this at all, just sort of the process at this point in time.

So we really haven't discussed any of the meat of this.

It was just sort of a background as to what Mr. Carrington and staff and I have been doing since the last time we met and then what the process might be if this board decides to go forward.

Is it fair to ask, well, I'm going to ask, are you and Bo and staff, just generally speaking in those meetings, are you all on the same page?

Are there different implications that aren't quite, that are all lined up or not?

Are there questions?

If that's a yes, I wonder if we could sort of maybe understand if there's a preliminary things we could talk about and maybe want to tweak this a little bit or not.

I don't know where the process all stands.

Absolutely.

I think the idea of this was for all of us to get together to look at this and see whether it was something that we agreed to, didn't agree to, wanted to amend.

But as far as staff, I mean, that's the one thing that I asked you guys initially.

Is it something that

at some point, not right now, don't say it right now, that you would be comfortable in saying that you had no objection to.

I would request that any letter that you sent to the board not include staff analysis.

Obviously, the BZA can reach its own conclusion, its own recommendation.

We will faithfully present the recommendation of the request of the BZA to the Board of Supervisors

Okay.

I have a question.

Well, I was just going to try and answer John's question.

It's my opinion after sitting in a couple of meetings and phone calls that

There are still some outstanding questions, budgetary and otherwise, but that at a high level, it seemed like everybody on those calls agreed that these were legitimate points of advocacy, that there may be some counterpoints, some negatives that are not on the sheet, but I think there was general momentum towards advancing this conversation.

Has there been any conversation with your counterparts in Greene, Loudoun County, Virginia Beach, Fairfax County, Richmond asking how their process has worked and as you talked about the budget implications, I'm sort of curious about the absences.

I think we got pretty good attendance here and I've not heard since I've been on two and a half years any recusals where somebody might have to come in on that.

based on the increase that they pay us per meeting to come in.

I'm just wondering that if an alternate, I'm asking several different questions, if an alternate were to come in because a member on this board had to recuse his or herself on a particular matter, is that alternate paid on a pro-rated basis just for that or would they be paid the entire amount just to sit on in that one matter?

Right, so we haven't solicited feedback from the other localities, just based on our, my experience in Green, that particular locality, if the member showed, then they got paid, right?

So that's not a discussion we've had with our finance department here, how that would work.

So based on the size of the budget and what the increase would be based on the number of meetings we have that

that is, we'll call that minimal for parts of that discussion.

But for the part of the discussion we have with finance about adding no new FTEs or no new positions to our budget or to our things, that now is, well, no, not such a, now it is a big deal because that falls in the term of part-timer, what that does to

the direction under budget of saying don't add any people no matter what, operate within the confines of what you have.

So it's depending on as we filter through the different lenses of and requests that we have for budget, for staffing, for effectiveness, for the valid points that are in the memo, those are all things that we'll have to look at as part of our analysis.

So what we don't wanna do is

is the BZA's desire to have that and have that be a pure request from you all.

So that's, I don't know if that helps answer the question or not.

So we had not reached out to any other localities, depending on which lens you use to look at the budget impact, whether it's the BZA budget, whether it's the CDD budget that supports that, right?

whether it's the overall county budget, the more we go up the scale, the smaller that number appears to impact.

But based on budget finance directions, no part-timer, no additional, operate with zero increase, then that's a different thing.

It was fine.

It was OK.

So I think the member may have sat only a few times.

I'd have to go back and check the record.

We didn't have a lot of.

It happened during a time when the conflict of interest form

was updated and reintroduced to the BZA.

So we had some members who were in conflict about what they would do, what they wouldn't do based on that form as far as filing it.

So the direction from the commonwealth's attorney up there was that if you don't fill out the form, you can't vote.

So they didn't resign, but they didn't fill out the form.

So we had a interesting dance, a different kind of situation than what's outlined and your kind of pros and cons

and trying to have somebody trained up, having somebody available, you know, those sorts of things.

So it was a little bit different.

We also had within the town, BZA, we combined the two because the town only had 300 people and if you take that 10%, all those people were volunteering for other things that run the town and we couldn't get enough folks to be on the BZA

By the time the BZA had a meeting every three years, they were moved away, or we'll call them moved on.

And so we had to do a combination there.

So there were some, there was a little, there were a little more mitigating circumstances in there, but having to do the extra packet and having the folks at the meeting, that, that wasn't an issue.

The hardest part for the alternative member, if they were present, is not participating in the conversation.

because you're not part of the board and you're not part of the public.

So your opinion stays in the chair, right?

Because you're that member that's needed if you're there.

So if the five of you are here and there's an alternative member, you don't ask that member what they think because they're not part of the conversation, right?

So there are some rules in there to be careful.

Mr. Herrick, I think this question may be to you.

The rules and the way that this comes to fruition, if it does, how are those procedures or policies set?

Is that set by the Board of Supervisors?

Is that something staff would suggest in order to

Think about who gets paid when, you know, do you get paid if you show up or do you only get paid if you are asked to step in for an absent member?

Right.

So those are spelled out actually in your agenda package on page 10 and 11 of your agenda package, the state law that's highlighted towards the end details exactly what the specifications are.

And specifically it provides that the qualifications, terms, and compensation of alternate members shall be the same as those of regular members.

So that's set by state law.

A regular member, when he knows that he will be absent from or will have to abstain from any application and meeting, shall notify the chair 24 hours prior to the meeting of such fact.

And then the chairman shall select an alternate to serve in the absent or abstaining member's place.

I think there's still some questions.

Thank you.

That's helpful.

And so to the extent that it's not covered by state law, it could be part of the rules of procedure of the BZA.

Thank you.

which we set in January, correct?

Correct, but those are subject to amendment at any time.

Okay.

I want to just say that one of my classmates, and I'll cover a little bit about the BZA training I went through in VCU this past summer, one of my classmates was the alternate retired Admiral Ard Morel.

He was a alternate in Green County, and he emailed me recently and said he just got appointed as a standing member of the BZA.

So he attended the meetings.

He got all the agenda packets that were sent out.

I think the overriding one for me is number five, a tie vote.

We talked a lot about this with Mike Chandler, by the way, says hi.

He was pleased to see that you're on the board here.

It's the two-two vote.

That makes it really, really difficult.

It leaves it difficult for the, Sony administrative leaves it difficult for the applicant, wondering what would have happened had that extra person been there and had a full board.

I think it really, I think anybody that comes before this body on an appeal is deserving to have a full board vote.

And for that reason, I think that number five

He said it's really to the advantage of the BZAs to have a full board.

He asked how many in the room were alternates.

A few raised their hands.

We had about 41 people attending.

And he applauded those.

He said there's only a few localities that have them.

and nothing more than that, but there was no real guidance.

Honestly, my concern was always about the time it takes for someone's seat to be filled.

Because as you guys have heard me say before, it took five months by the time I applied and then the time I was appointed.

And we've had that happen.

David Bowerman left us.

May I ask a question about succession?

It's listed here as the number one point, which is what you're talking about.

I wonder, is there anything, and maybe I can address this to Mr. Herrick,

or Mr. Svoboda.

Absolutely.

I think that the best way to address succession would be for the members of the BZA to have sort of a successor, proposed successor in mind and to sort of encourage that proposed successor to have on file an application with the circuit court.

So that at the time that the current members of the board choose to leave office then there's already a successor lined up and ready to go on file with the circuit court.

Mr.

They're appointed by the Circuit Court.

No, not here.

The Circuit Court has requested that the county's involvement be no more than collecting interested applications.

OK, good.

But that solution requires some foresight, right?

Well, that's the least bad thing that would happen in the hypothetical, that the BZA has only four members.

The person in the hospital recuperating, I'm sure, would think about other things.

Let me ask this, because I feel for the people who believe that five people should be here to rule on individual requests.

and I think that's important because I think you need to give people the sense that they've had their day, even if they lose, I mean that they've had their day to have people listen to what they believe.

And just to facilitate that, accelerating succession is one issue, I think.

The second issue is clarity in future scheduling.

One of the things that I find frustrating is, and maybe you don't know because you don't know the cases that are going to be coming before us,

is the uncertainty that can be months long about will there be a meeting in January, February, et cetera.

So I guess another question to Mr. Herrick might be, is there any way to accelerate the clarity of future meetings so that this kind of vacation planning, maybe not

getting hit by a bus, but other things that are predictable.

As you probably know, the annual calendar, the annual meeting schedule is set at the organizational meeting each January, and so that's the first Tuesday of every month with a couple of exceptions, one of which is maybe the first week of July with the 4th of July holiday.

If the 4th of July falls on that first Tuesday of July, that may be an issue.

and then the first Tuesday of November is often election day.

But other than that, if BZA members simply hold the first Tuesday of the month, that calendar is set at the organizational meeting.

Well, I understand that, you know, and the first Tuesday issue is predictable, but the cancellations seem to be fairly common.

I mean, maybe I've been here to bring the time.

Maybe these meetings were monthly in the past.

They were not.

Okay.

Going back to my initial point, is it possible for us to know faster when there won't be a request?

So Ms. Alley typically sends out a notice 30 or 60 days prior to a meeting.

If we've come within that time prior to a meeting and no applications have arrived, I believe Ms. Alley is pretty prompt about sending out a notice saying, no applications have been received, you can remove the 30 to 60 day out meeting.

Yeah, go ahead.

Just to, I think to,

to add a point to that.

So a meeting can be canceled for that reason, but then also there's a strict timeline that must be met when an application comes in and they have a right to be heard within a period, a certain amount of time.

from several moving wheels that can either, but also a deferral can be asked.

can withdraw or can extend.

I understand those possibilities.

I just have a third point, and I'll stop talking about the Zoom meeting.

We had one participant in our recent meeting do it via Zoom, and I thought that was very effective as far as I was concerned.

And not that that should be the norm, that people shouldn't be here, but that talking heads on a screen.

But I think

You know, we should not make light of that possibility to get the five so that the people who come before this group actually do get five people to vote on their request.

I thought we, yeah, you were away once and that was perfectly fine with me and I just wondered,

Absolutely.

It's relatively new in that it's post-COVID.

As you may know, the General Assembly modified some of the rules about remote participation.

and BZA now has a set of bylaws that's fully compliant with state law, enables members to participate remotely, not all the time, but on certain reasons, a certain number of times.

There does need to be a quorum physically present in order to admit remote members.

Yeah, that brings up something that we've talked a little bit about in this conversation is just that the quorum is three.

And so we use this term full board, which I think is certainly a good ideal.

And certainly four presents an opportunity for us.

But I think that it's good to point out that a full board is technically three.

One more brief question for Mr. Herrick.

You said that the applicant can defer, which the applicant can.

Yes, I mean, the board can accept a motion to defer and can vote on a motion to defer.

That's correct.

It's not jurisdictional.

but I mean so there's not there's not a consequence for for violating that 90 days yeah we obviously try to uh in all cases to get folks shared within those 90 days the state law provides yeah the reason I excuse me one last thing the reason I said that was I wondered if we were in a situation where we had four or three even and we didn't feel comfortable in having the resolution based on the four three or four people voting

If we could initiate maybe a one month deferral or even less that wouldn't have to be so that the fifth member or the fourth and fifth members would be here and we could have the full board as you say so that we can manage it in this way too rather than

That's one way to do it.

The statute already provides that in the event of a tie, the applicant can request that the matter be deferred to the next meeting.

I see.

So there is a safety valve.

Okay.

Is that a rehearing?

That's correct.

That's how I see it, Andy.

You don't just play it before the fifth member and then do a vote.

Well, it's a provision of 15.2-2311D in any appeal taken pursuant to this section, the appeal section of the state code.

If the board's attempt to reach a decision results in a tie vote, the matter may be carried over.

until the next scheduled meeting at the request of the person filing the appeal.

So the term that the state law used is carried over.

I'm not sure whether that means re-heard or voted on a pen again, but it is carried over.

I read that I guess it's similar to deferred.

And I suppose you keep carrying it over until you get five here.

So, and Mr. Svoboda wanted to clarify the timing in terms of 90 days.

On that meeting schedule, you'll see there's a 60-day lag between when you file and when the meeting is scheduled.

The reason for that, we don't do 90 or a longer period of time, and so the board has the ability to make that one deferral to the 90 days and still meet our obligation under the Code of Virginia.

So that's kind of the timing on that.

That's why that...

Although it's not jurisdictional.

So, so, so let me know, correct.

It's jurisdictional means that we get to stress.

And so Mr.

Bowling is correct.

But let me understand you clearly.

So is there a hard 90-day limit on if we were to defer or if there's not?

So we could say defer one month, get to 90 days.

And if we still didn't have five,

Only with the applicants.

But only from that.

I suppose you could, but why would you want to do it?

Lots of times you can figure it out, in my experience.

But maybe not.

That's true.

That's true.

And when you do tie, you can always then, you can always, somebody can pipe up and say, well, it's tied.

That means that the voting administrator's decision rules.

Wait a minute.

Would you go over that again?

So it's at the meeting itself.

No, it can tell the applicant that there's a tie vote.

That means the

Doning Administrator's decision prevails.

However, if you don't agree with it, which we assume you don't, you can request that the matter be carried over to the next meeting to where the four or five... After we've made a vote, after we've made that vote, after we've made the two to two vote, then they can request at the meeting that it be carried over.

Well, it's up to the applicant to make that request.

But it would be, I mean, by its own terms, state law says if the board's attempt to reach a decision results in a tie vote, and obviously you can't get to a tie vote without the vote actually having been taken.

Does that have to happen at the meeting?

or can that happen 10 days later?

Okay, thank you, thank you.

It's been 30 days.

That gets kind of murky too, but you'd want to comply with what the code is.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah.

It occurs to me that this conversation with

with all of the possibilities, the range of possibilities that can occur when you don't have the five members there.

There are remedies each step of the way, but it would be a convenience to the appellant, assuming all things considered, to be able to

calling an alternate, hear it when they're ready, when their attorney is ready to roll, it's all scheduled, they're prepared, they had an expectation at their end that it was scheduled for a particular day.

And having the alternate would allow that to occur without taking these other measures.

I mean, it's like almost a customer service.

consideration, or a matter of convenience to them, as well as if I knew there was an alternate, I would be much more inclined to, if I was gonna be out of town and out of the time zone, where I would realize that I could phone in on Zoom, which I've done on other committees,

from other places.

If there was an alternate in my place, I would not do that and know that things were in good hands.

I really appreciated you taking off beach mode and went back into BZA mode for four or five hours and then went back to whatever you were doing

I'm asking to go back a few months.

You'll remember Atlas and the Porta Potties, okay, and the flood plains.

I had asked at that time, and we were running up to that 90 day, as I recall, it was about a week, we didn't have a whole lot of time to play with.

I had asked about a deferral, whether or not we could defer it.

And I was told that this board could not seek the deferral.

The deferral had to come from the applicant or the appellant.

So now I'm confused.

So as I recall in that particular case, my advice to the board was that it couldn't be deferred without the applicant's consent and the applicant was not consenting.

The applicant wanted a vote that day.

I wanted a deferral.

They did not.

That's correct.

And I suppose it's possible that the board could have gone against the request and done the deferral without them.

But then, as Mr. Bolton suggests, what that does is that would put the board past the 90 days and give the applicant grounds for

Okay, thank you.

I would advise against that.

You know as a probably we should think about because we could do this all day right as far as the what ifs so as we start to wrap this up a couple things to think about is that if the board approves this we're going to have to look at the bylaws and things and have those in place prior to a member coming on board right if that's the way the board goes some of the things to think about how we're going to handle is I get a 2-2 vote because somebody abstained not because

they weren't here or that they recuse themselves.

Okay, so I have a valid thing.

So that's something that you have your five members and they just didn't vote.

And so to the optics of that and saying, well, I wanna have another meeting and the same five show up, I can't sub that out, right?

If there's not a legitimate reason for that member to recuse themselves or that they're absent.

So some of the really far out there things

that we would have to deal with if we have five seating folks that either, what happens if somebody recuses themselves?

What happens if somebody just abstains?

I have no conflict.

I just don't want to vote.

And it ends up in that tie.

So there's different things to think about as we go through bylaws and some different things, right?

When we talk about what happens when somebody requests it, we only have four and there's a two-two tie.

As I look at that code section, this is something that we would have to talk about with the attorneys is says the next scheduled meeting in order to provide the public, the neighbor who's complaining or the person who wants the decision, how far out is that, right?

Is that our next scheduled meeting on the schedule?

Is that our next scheduled meeting when we get an application?

So there's some due process things to consider in that decision would the best optics on that is that that's made at that

meeting to go to the next meeting.

Because everybody who wants knowledge about that application or want to participate in an application is present at that time, right?

They're monitoring that particular meeting where the decision is being made.

So we defer to a date specific is kind of generally what we call it.

So different things to think about as we move forward in alternates and other things like that.

So just some

some other lenses there.

I will say I'm often accused of making things too complex and I just don't think this is that complex.

It kind of like brings to mind KISS, keep it simple stupid.

You know, somebody, if a board member wants to say I want to abstain because I don't feel right about participating, I think we'd be crazy not to let him do it, you know.

and who's gonna challenge that board member.

But I just don't see this being a huge problem regardless of what the board of supervisors decides to do one way or the other, except it may keep you from having to do a redo, which I can assure you all the members who participated in the first meeting would not be particularly excited about participating in the second and hearing the same thing all over again.

But really,

Yeah, I've only seen abstention probably two times in my 30 years.

Excuse me, just a moment.

OK, well, right now I'm searching for words as I make the motion.

Maybe I nail it.

I move that we move forward towards asking the board of supervisors to allow us to have two

Could I suggest that if you're going to make a motion that you authorize the chairman to write a letter and then go have that start your motion as a process if that's what you want to do?

but I didn't mean, I apologize for interrupting you but that's the process, it looks like that.

The chair is in favor of, the chairman announced at the start.

Okay, so I move that we authorize the chair to request that the board of supervisors

The hesitancy is

Okay, let's have some discussion on what the hesitancy is.

I think I was more just trying to parse through the language.

I track with Mr. Shepherd that it's a little bit of a process.

You know, some of the very valid reasons to appoint an alternate, in my opinion, are

somewhat mitigated by what was new to me, the code sections that Mr. Herrick read.

So there are downstream remedies that I was not aware of that would mitigate some of the benefit.

I think my general sense, since we're, I think at that point where we need to make our positions clear, my general sense is that this is,

A nice to have.

I think it's generally positive and I don't think there's any negative.

It might cost a few dollars.

I can't imagine that it will be significant.

I would generally concur with that.

I appreciate the work that was put into outlining the reasons, these six stated reasons for requesting a BZA member.

Again, Mr. Carrington just stated, I too was unaware of some of the remedies that were available to us.

But as was just stated, it's so nice to have.

I would like to, I mean, the two things again, the tie vote is important, making sure that there's clarity and that all parties feel as though they've had their say and were able to have their positions received, understood, debated and discussed and voted on.

I think that that's important so that there's no question what would have happened if that fifth chair had been filled.

Succession is really important together with the experience.

I don't know what it was like for this board to sit during the time that the vacancy occurred that I subsequently filled.

I don't know how many boats that you had, but I think that

One thing that I've found missing from the entire discussion is any data about votes over time, presence, absences.

You know, and I'm not saying that these concerns of the two to two tie issue, you know, are they theoretical or realistic?

What are the last five years of data?

How many times has there been lack of quorum?

How many times has there been a tie vote?

Yeah, two to two.

Basically, what I'm wondering with the data that I haven't seen is how serious is this problem?

There are theoretical issues I see everyone is pointing to, and I concur with most of what I've heard.

But I just don't know.

If this board meets four or five times a year, and I don't know if that's the frequency that's predictable,

How many times does any of this happen or has this happened in the recent past, you know, not 20 years ago, but as I said, you know, how frequently is the board encountering this and

I just haven't heard.

There's been this assumption that this is a problem.

It was.

It was a huge case.

Well, it was an important matter.

And that's why I asked the question of whether the board could defer.

And I'm a little confused about what I seem to be hearing is that the deferral can come only from the applicant's side if it appears to be an unsatisfactory result, but an entire result.

So, but that was an important case.

I understand what you're saying.

It's significant, but was that rare?

You know, we could talk about rare and important, but I think that if you're the appellant, you think it's rare and important to you.

So I think that that's the other aspect of this is that,

the folks who came in for the one that's been appealed to circuit court, they didn't have an attorney at the time.

They were a bunch of neighbors that got together.

So they really didn't know what they could do and what they couldn't do.

So I think that's a part of it.

And that particular case, it would have been much clearer for them had there been a full board.

I mean, that's all.

where I saw the consequence from that recent case, that's certainly front of mind for me.

Looking back, like what sorts of, what people were thinking about calculating whether to defer or not based on who was on the board when they were not somewhat knowable because the dynamic

and these cases would have been different.

That's what I'm saying.

but moving forward, but I think this addresses, that's why I'm saying, I'm thinking back, I don't recall many instances where it would have had any effect at all on how the deferrals worked and all those mechanisms.

So that's why I say I'm looking forward rather than backward.

I'm not sure how much like that, how much my opinion would be

As I was listening to you all, one of the things that really jumped out to me, Mr. Burkhart, is what you said about, have we done any research on what other localities have done?

And I think that that would be really helpful as something to add to this, just maybe a short paragraph or something saying we've spoken with blah-di-blah-di-blah

and here's what they do and here's how they handle it and here's the problems, here's the rewards or whatever.

The other thing is so that could be part of your amendment and amendments here.

I'm sorry, I want to amend your motion.

So if we amend the motion, something like that to add more information on that.

And the other amendment I also add is that this letter will be reviewed by all of you before it ever goes to the Board of Supervisors.

so that everyone will be able to take a look at it, see what the impact is and whether or not they want it.

And in my opinion, you all should have a veto power.

So if there's something in there that you don't want, then I'd like us all to agree that we could support that person and remove it.

that level of trust in all of us that we could do that.

Ms. Joseph, can I respond?

I think what you suggested was very wise, the other jurisdictional practices.

What would be interesting is we have a list of places in point two here, but

You know, how many do they have as alternates?

So they have one, they have two, they have three.

How often has the alternate actually participated?

You know, never once in two years, you know, some frequency of participation.

Let me think of other questions.

You can probably think of better ones than I can, but things, you know, that are relevant to the need basically, because the board of supervisors

I would imagine are going to say, why do we need this?

Well, the other thing that we can do as staff is talk about the data that you talked about.

In the last five years, how often have we had a full board?

And because of the absence of somebody leaving, somebody dying,

people identified as potential successors and do what I heard the necessary steps were to get that person teed up in the event that there was someone retiring or someone ill or something permanently withdrawing.

That's a very wise suggestion, I think.

I have a question for you, Madam Chairman, on that 2-2 case that we just talked about recently.

I recall that you gave some closing comments regarding appeal of that.

Would it be appropriate to be able to have that language revised in a way to also mention the opportunity to have the case again deferred?

Yeah, re-heard, because I'm not sure that the appellant knew that.

I mean, I've come to school board meetings, and as testy as they get, we had probably 75 or 80 people in here on that particular case.

And I know that there's been questions asked.

I don't recall if it was in that one or not, where they

Ask the county attorney's office for advice and the response is we don't give legal advice.

That's what you do.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I didn't know until just now.

The appeal language is like just routine determinations that are issued by the zoning administrator.

There's always the boilerplate appeal language with the 30-day limit or deadline.

No one knows.

So if

If John agrees to the amendments, if Bo agrees to the amendments, the amendments would be that more research would be provided on BZA alternates in other localities.

We'd find some data about what's been happening in the past maybe five, six years as to how often there were four instead of five.

Then I can take a stab at this and send it out to everybody.

And we'll see how it goes after that.

What I'd really love to do is hope that we can get this to the new board in January so that they can take a look at it.

So are we going to withdraw the motion?

So I understood the motion and be deputizing you to go ahead and send the letter on our behalf to the Board of Supervisors.

So you have a motion and a second.

It's on the floor at present, as I heard it.

Is that everybody's understanding?

Yes, we did not

vote on that.

I would like to change that motion.

In my mind, it was like to take the steps and that what I was looking for before I try to put this in the shape of a motion is to

Yeah, but I'm not trying to anticipate all the implications right now, or it might be that as you're composing the letter, more questions come up, more information comes, we have more of a sense of,

and other localities.

Experiences with this might change our approach, might, you know, so I'm not, I'm really trying, I'm not trying to do something specific here that is gonna tie our hands or, you know, like a final direction to you.

No, I'm fine.

I mean, I'd be happy to draft something off and send it to everybody.

That's kind of where I am and take in all the information that we heard today.

And if I didn't hear it all, I'm hoping that you will add to it whatever it needs.

I'd be happy to talk unless you've met some new buds at the last when you went to Richmond.

but you and I could work together Kurt if you want to do that to figure out who we can talk to in these other localities to get some information.

Maybe we can come up with a template so that we'll have the same sort of questions that we're asking them that we can use.

We can figure that out.

You know, I think this is going to be a helpful exercise because I could just see the new board coming, especially a new member that's never been on the board before stepping up, asking some good questions that might say, you know, as Mr. Rosenberg said, well, over the last couple of years, what's the frequency of absences and how many votes were, you know, resulted in a tie and where's the compelling need to really do this?

So if we've done our homework,

And it looks like we've got our ducks in a row.

OK.

We have a motion and a second.

So if you don't want to proceed with the motion, then somebody needs to withdraw the motion and so forth.

Does that need a second?

We're actually in agreement between the five of us that we'll go ahead and we'll work on this.

We'll work on a letter within a couple of weeks, probably after Thanksgiving.

I'll send something out to you and take a look at it and I will give you a deadline to get it back to us so that we have something that we can present to the board in

OK. Well, that leads us to our January meeting because we have to have our organizational meeting in January.

Good.

No, I believe you.

Thank you.

I want this.

What you could do is prepare a letter and bring it back to the January meeting so that it can be approved at that time.

Got a question about the January meeting.

This past January, we had a whole lot of red that we had to approve, as I recall, in our rules and procedures.

The previous year was a lot of cleanup on just language, just a cleanup detail.

Do you anticipate that rules and procedures, there's gonna be a lot of new stuff added?

No updates from us that I'm aware of, right?

This is just a procedure in re-adopting that so everything stays fresh each year.

Once that takes place, probably sometime later in the year, you may end up with the red line depending on what the result of the January meeting is and what the result of the Board of Supervisors decision is.

We might have to make some changes there.

But I think

Mr. Burkhart, we were in the process of doing some bylaw changes when you were pointing out the bar.

I think that process may have already started, if I'm not mistaken, but I'm not sure.

We hadn't looked at the bylaws in a number of years, and then we had some COVID things that we had to do, and some COVID things we had to undo, that kind of thing was going on.

I think that was all part of that.

So as a routine, just part of the routine now, the BZA has indicated to us that we want to review the bylaws every year.

So at that meeting, we would talk about officers, right?

Yes.

And that is also a meeting where we would cover the renewal, which I assume we will do, of Mr.

Bowling's contract.

Is that when we should, I forget the timing of that.

And I know that our recommendation has to be in front of the, should be in front of the board in time.

So in anticipation of the BZA wanting to continue utilizing Mr.

Bowling's services, we carried over the same amount in the budget that we had last year, partly because we think that you wanna take advantage of that still, but also our direction and budget for using the same amount was don't extend any items

don't increase any line items in the budget.

So that's why we carry it over the same amount.

So I don't know whether the, and so January would be a time to talk about that, to see if there is a desire for any increase based on the way the contract is written.

That's something we can talk about at that time, whether or not that amount needs to go up, whether or not, cause it's a hourly with a cap annually,

So if that's sufficient, I don't know if the hourly matters, except for the frequency of meetings, right?

So if we start having a meeting a month, then Mr.

It's not the frequency of the meeting, it's the length.

Yeah, so those are some of the things, but we did include it in our first round of budgets and medals, which was last week, Friday, and that item's carried over to this year.

Thanks.

Do you either support staff's request or you wish to discontinue Mr.

Probably within the budget packet, I think it would be best that the BZA formally say that we want to continue that.

Okay.

And the other thing at that meeting, we'll be setting the agenda or the meetings, actually scheduling the meetings.

So we will approve that also.

Yes.

Well, the initial meeting, it will have, you'll let your officers and whether or not any of that's going to change.

We'll

Re-adapt the bylaws.

There may be things when you get the packet and review the bylaws that we might talk about and leave the same or talk about and may want to schedule another meeting to tweak some of that.

You'll have your letter that we just talked about for the alternate, right, as part of that.

And then the schedule.

So the schedule will be laid out.

They should all be in your packet.

We try and take into account

So like the January meeting is not the first Tuesday, it's the second, because the first Tuesday is the day after the holiday.

So we'll take into account the holidays, we'll take into account election day to make sure we make the adjustments.

Excuse me, Bart.

With election day, there's actually three elections next year.

One of them, March 5th.

Primary in the summer, but it's farther into June.

Gotcha.

Anybody else think of anything that might be a conflict on that Tuesday?

Thank you.

Okay, if that is the case, is there

Any new business, anything, anyone?

Go ahead.

And that is about the training, which I've been supportive of.

It seemed like a good thing.

Would you mind yielding your time for a moment so that I could briefly address it and then it sounds like that's a perfect segue of what you want to talk about.

Thank you.

Even better.

Okay.

Sit back and relax.

Well, this is about all I have.

Pardon me to show for this, but I'll pass it down to the chair to take a look.

The three-day course was most interesting.

I want to thank Mr.

Herring for coming down and doing a presentation.

Everybody afterwards during the break thought I was quite fortunate to have

someone with your skills and knowledge working with the BZA, so thank you.

We had the opportunity to read three books, two were provided through the course, the third I purchased because I don't do very well with Xerox paper and another binder.

As I was mentioning Mr. Carrington at the beginning, just before the meeting, the first two and a half years on this board, pardon me, first two and a half years on this board,

I've done a lot of research.

I really, this was out of my wheelhouse.

I learned what I could, but what was really interesting was to go there and with the staff and under the direction of Mike Chandler, who's the course director, validated exactly what I'd been doing.

I have to say that it gave me a lot to think about.

I will probably have a couple of suggestions in our rules and procedures for January that I might,

I wish to put forward for discussion and possible inclusion, but overall I thought it was a wonderful process and I would highly recommend that anyone who does not come with some level of experience in this field

require, well, not require, but highly encourage that person that first year to take this training.

It was well worth the time, and I really appreciate, Bart, your staff for picking up the tab on this.

Thank you very much.

Is it possible to, does the Board of Zoning Appeals have a board budget so that books, these three books could be bought for all the board members?

I don't think they'd be very expensive.

The only thing that the budget office or the board of supervisors could tell us is no.

We do have a books and subscription line item within zoning and we'll look at it at

whether we move some money around or add some additional stuff so we can cover the cost of the books.

We'll see what we can do.

That would be great because I think it'd be, you know, it can't do anything but help.

I did.

Just following up on it.

So I have taken classes from Mike Chandler in the past.

I think it's great that he's still doing it.

I mean, he is sort of a legend in Virginia in really professionalizing

BZA work, zoning employees work, and just public service, you know, across the board.

Yeah, well, me too.

I'm thousands.

But anyway, just, you know, encourage it.

But I'm also just saying that I was disappointed in the schedule of these hearings because they

They just create both of the virtual and also in-person conflicts with elections coming up.

And I really want a clear head for what's coming in 2024 with that, but I'm interested in, I'd like to like, you know, keep my finger on this and maybe do this again if a time when,

Thank you for your enthusiasm because you could have come back and said it was a bust.

Well, what's actually kind of twisted in a way is that I couldn't put these things down.

I read three of these in one month and it did, I don't know.

Seven or eight quizzes, had to write a short essay, but I constantly went back to these things because there's great reference from one to the other, and the way it was assigned is you get the zoning 101, then you get this complete guide to zoning, which was really

written for realtors and then this one that he said was out of print and I later corrected him and said no as a matter of fact the copyright had been purchased by somebody else and now it's reprinted this Board of Adjustment.

So the three books just added a whole lot of clarity to what my role is on the BZA.

We had 41 people attending about

all throughout the state of Virginia.

We had, my gosh, we had five from Essex County, five, which was very interesting.

But we had our Loudoun counties.

We had our Fairfax.

We had Herndon.

I mean, we had them grown up from all over the state.

It was great to talk with others and just hear stories, which you and I will do when we make those phone calls.

Yep.

OK. Is there any other new business?

Okay, then I think that we can go ahead and adjourn.

Okay, all those in favor please just say aye.

Aye.

Anyone opposed?

Okay, then we will adjourn the meeting at 3 26.