Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) Meeting   1/9/2024

So we have a nomination for Mr. Carrington.

Is there a second?

Second.

We have a nomination for Mr. Carrington by Mr. Shepherd and a second by Mr. Rosenberg.

Are there any other nominations?

Hearing none, just to confirm, Mr. Carrington, do you accept the nomination?

I do.

Mr. Rosenberg?

Aye.

Mr. Shepherd?

Aye.

Ms. Joseph?

All right, the nomination passes.

Our newly elected chair is Mr. Carrington.

I think the next order of business is to get a nomination for vice chair and

I propose that we can just do this by a slate.

Is that appropriate?

Two positions at once, Secretary and Vice Chair.

Is that all right?

Sure.

That's how you want to do it, Mr.

Chair.

Okay.

I would like to nominate Mr. Burkhart for Vice Chair and Mr. Shepherd for Secretary.

Second.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Can we go ahead and vote?

Mr. Shepherd?

Aye.

Mr. Burkhardt?

Aye.

Mr. Carrington?

Aye.

Mr. Rosenberg?

Aye.

Ms. Joseph?

Is that me?

Mr.

All right, thank you, Mr. Rolling.

So, Mr. Burkhart, thank you for serving as our vice chair.

And Mr. Shepherd, thank you for serving as our secretary.

Next item of business is review and readopt rules of procedure.

Any comments?

One just clarifying point.

Have there been any changes proposed for our rules?

What's in front of us?

Are there any changes from last year or proposals for

No, at this time there's no current proposals.

Staff is looking at some procedural changes, but I think we may hold off on those until later in the year as we weed through our new community development system adoption process as we're looking at procedures.

Mr. Carrington, I just wanted to point out a couple of things.

When I was reading this last night, I knew that it was going to rain today.

It says that the chair, the vice chair, and finds and declares the weather or other conditions that are such it is hazardous for BZA members.

Just remember this.

to attend a regular meeting that the meeting shall be continued at the next regular meeting date.

So we can, we do have the power to do something like that.

I was just hoping someone would call me this morning and say, sorry, the county office building is closed, but that didn't happen.

And I just wanted to remind us all that it's in here because I thought it was really interesting that the BZA itself really had to make the determination that they would rehear it too.

So it's not just, at least I think that's the way I'm reading this, is that the applicant can't just come back in and say I wanted this re-heard, but it has to give reasons why and we have to accept those reasons.

I think I'm reading that right.

but that was a big deal to me.

Thank you.

That's all, Mr. Carrington.

I just thought it was interesting to go back through this again.

Is there a second?

I second that.

Seconded by Mr. Shepherd.

Mr. Rosenberg?

Aye.

Mr. Burkhart?

Aye.

Mr. Shepherd?

Aye.

Ms. Joseph?

Mr. Carrington, I'm gonna be a stickler at the very start and I won't do it anymore, I promise.

Okay, all right, thank you.

That motion to readopt the rules of procedure passes unanimously.

which Mr. Chairman.

Yes, sir.

I see that we are to meet on March 5th and March 5th is also the day of Super Tuesday.

I won't be here for that.

Neither will I. I don't think Mr. Burkhart will be here for that.

I don't think we should have a BZA meeting on Election Day.

Yeah.

I think our normal practice has been to push a week to the, is that right?

Or to pull it a week earlier, later, okay.

So that would put us at March 12th instead of March 5th.

That will not cause a problem at this point,

Thank you, Francis, that would be great.

The only other thing we'd have to look at is whether we can get Lane.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I would, Mr. Chairman, I would go ahead and set it for March 12, subject to the clerk notifying you that March 12 is not available.

And then you might want to consider a backup date while everybody's here so we can get it out of the way.

Probably 241.

Well, okay.

Why don't we just make it subject to March 12th, subject to the clerk verifying that the room is available, and if not, that there's another room that's available for March 12th, and she takes care of the advertising anyhow.

That seems to do it.

Sure.

All right, any other comments or questions or conflicts?

I will say that I am going to be traveling again on my August trip.

So August 6th meeting is on my radar as one that I will not be present in this room for.

And y'all were gracious enough last year to let me participate remotely.

And I might be happy to do that again.

Or who knows, maybe we'll have an alternate by then.

I don't think it's necessary at this point

to try and find a different date.

We don't know if we'll have any sort of appeal or application for that date.

All right.

One question.

You were able to do a Zoom participation.

Is there a procedure for requesting that?

I think it is requested to the chair and perhaps in this instance I think it would probably fall to the vice chair.

And I recall there being a start to the meeting where I was listening in but not actively on the board until I was voted in for that meeting in some form or fashion.

Just a quick comment, Mr. Chairman, on page seven of the proposed draft procedures here.

There is the remote participation policy already outlined for us.

Yes.

So I'll make a motion.

Please.

I move that we accept the proposed schedule with the exception that the March 5 date will be changed to March 12.

And that is subject to

I think that's fine.

Motion made by Mr. Shepherd and second by Mr. Burkhardt.

Mr. Burkhart?

Aye.

Mr. Shepherd?

Aye.

Mr. Rosenberg?

Aye.

Ms. Joseph?

All right, the motion passes.

Adopting the 2024 meeting schedule with the loan change from March 5 to March 12.

Next order of business since there are no public hearings is approval of minutes from our meeting on November 14, 2023.

Do we have any comments or changes that are needed?

Is there a second?

Second.

All right.

Mr. Shepherd?

Aye.

Mr. Rosenberg?

Aye.

Ms. Joseph?

Aye.

Aye.

All right, motion approving the minutes from November 14th passes.

Moving on to old business.

We have a possible appointment of alternate BZA members.

That has been an ongoing discussion.

Ms. Joseph has been spearheading the bulk of that.

I know you sent an email.

Yeah, first I'll offer a mea culpa that I didn't do anything in November or December.

And I do apologize.

But I did create this little table.

And I want you all to please take a look at it, maybe decide whether or not we need to change anything on this or add anything.

Oh, you've got one too.

And these, I was not the author.

I just put them in a table.

The author is sitting next to me, Mr. Burkhart.

So I thought they were great questions to ask.

And these are what we will, when we make our phone calls, these are the questions so that there will be continuity between every person that we talk to.

and I made an executive decision Mr. Burkhart and gave you a couple of these and took a couple of them and I'm also wondering whether we should contact Green and Mr. Shepherd tells me that Charlottesville also has an alternate so we can talk to them too so we can split those up.

No.

Possibly.

Okay, well, the question I have is if we come up, my partner here, Mr. Burkhart and I come up with a letter that we'd like to present to the Board of Supervisors.

Not official, and I don't like to see you do that as a matter of practice because

It can lead to some very bad habits, but it doesn't seem to be, if that's the only way to do it, to have it be done quickly, go ahead and send it out.

Can I ask a question?

I read over these questions, and they're fine, but they seem to be lacking one thing.

You mentioned a few jurisdictions you were hoping to send this to.

In the event that a jurisdiction has adopted this policy, how about a question that says, do you have any provision in your rules and regulations that governs the appointment and use of alternates so we can look

You know, there's no need, if we decide to go ahead with this, and I don't know if that's been decided, no need to reinvent the wheel.

And if, you know, Fairfax County has a provision that they've run through their council and other means, it'd be nice to know what that language is.

It would be easy.

So just to add one more question, if you do have such a policy,

Good.

Well, you know, if we can find something that's good, why not use it if we if we decide to go down this road?

I just think the decision has already been made that we're going down the road.

Right, but if this is, who knows what the board says, they might say, we don't want to spend $3,000 more, but if they do, to give them and Mr. Herrick and the planning staff

at least a target of language.

We don't want to create more work for them.

Sure.

I have no objection to what you were saying.

Our website

You know there's a BCA page on the county website and down in the weeds in the forms rules of procedure are there and that's where you'd find it.

It's probably readily available but it's a good point to systematically not you know to hit them all and get a real across-the-board sense of how people do it.

Yeah, I just have to pull the Fairfax counties.

They do have on Article 1 membership, Section 2 alternates, and they list out the rights and privileges of the alternates are as follows.

If that's desirable, I'm not saying it is.

I haven't seen it, but why not just lift it?

And then figure out the procedure for amending our own rules to incorporate it.

This looks good.

It'll work here.

OK, well, Mr. Burkhart and I really haven't talked about a time frame.

but it sounds as if we're not having anything happening in February for sure.

So that gives us some time to gather the information and I guess one of the things we can definitely do is maybe not get the letter approved by email but actually send you the information that we've collected.

so that you have some background so when the letter comes to you, you'll know that we're just not making this stuff up, that we've done some research on this.

Sure.

Okay.

So maybe March.

And that would be consideration for you to send it to the Board of Supervisors?

OK. All right.

I don't think we need any action on that.

But I would say thank you to both of you, Ms. Joseph and Mr. Burkhart, for taking on that effort.

And if it turns into a heavier lift than you're expecting, feel free to leverage your fellow board members.

And I raise my hand to certainly be the first one tapped to help.

All right.

We can move on to new business.

Is there any new business?

I have one thing I'd like to just throw out for general conversation.

And the county attorney's office might want to chime in.

It's a legislative item.

I believe that the General Assembly will be considering legislation that would allow public bodies to hold their meetings virtually.

My personal feeling is I like the personal touch.

when we're sitting here and we get to see and feel and the appellant also gets to have the interaction with the board.

I think we'd be missing a lot and I think that would be up to the public body to make that decision on where they'd like to go.

My personal preference would be to keep the in-person meetings and avoid as much as possible unless we have situations that warrant to keep our meetings in the public.

Mr. Burkhart, can you send us any information that you have on that?

I'd have to Google it just like you would, to be honest, and I'd be happy to do that.

But I remember I was sitting at the legislative priorities meeting, and that was discussed as something that I guess had not passed in the last assembly, and they want to move it forward this time.

I agree about the benefit of in-person meetings.

I think the only

The only people that really benefit from a virtual meeting is the person who's doing the minutes because the virtual meeting tends to really limit a real exchange of ideas and it also eliminates the communication that occurs with direct eye contact, body language,

and so forth and so on.

I think there's a lot of nuance that comes into a face-to-face meeting as opposed to Zoom meetings.

So if there was a place to state that in the course of that process, I would be in favor of it.

And I'll just say here, I much prefer a face-to-face meeting than a virtual meeting, personally.

Let me add something that I think reinforces what you were saying.

When we discuss matters like we are today that are not cases, they're discussing policy and how should we go forward.

I think everything you said doesn't, with me, have as much force because we could talk about whether there should be a new provision in the rules to govern something or other.

But we're a quasi-judicial body when cases come to us and that's sort of a court, functioning as a court.

And I think people who come before us are asking for a resolution.

reached a conflict with the planning staff on some issue and they want us to rule in kind of a court-like way.

And I think all the things you were saying, I think are meaningful to the applicant, especially if the applicant is denied.

So they feel they've gotten, they've had their fair share of being able to explain themselves and have a neutral decision maker say, we agree or we disagree with you.

So if the authority to have virtual meetings does come about, I would like to continue to have cases done in the format we have today.

And I'm not so strong, I don't have a strong feeling about ruminations, about amendments to our rules.

That could be done Zoom or it could be done face to face.

I think it's a fair point.

It's a good distinction because I'm not as concerned about getting my points across in that way here.

I think I can accomplish that on a Zoom meeting.

It's a different, there's so much less at stake.

Thank you for making it.

I don't know if people agree with me, but

You know, my feeling is to the applicant in cases that they feel they get a fair hearing, whether the outcome was favorable or unfavorable, you know, that's part of, you know, due process, I think.

So in any case, I don't know how we'll go with this and who knows whether the legislation will even pass.

You know how many bills get submitted in the General Assembly that just sort of vanish into the ether?

Yeah, I would just share that I agree with that notion having been in the shoes of an appellant in a nearby jurisdiction and that having taken place exclusively over Zoom, I felt like it was flippant and hollow in some way.

And I agree, I think we should, particularly for appeals and variances probably.

be in person.

That's an interesting point, honestly, because you do have that separation, right?

When you're not really looking you in the face and telling you your reasons is that it does place you apart from the appellant.

So I

You know, I get what you're saying.

Although most of us would rather stay home in our jammies.

Well, if all of it is, is approving minutes or something, conducting some sort of business like that, then perhaps it's OK. Any further comment?

All right.

There's not going to be a meeting in February, February 6.

This is kind of old business, but can you give us maybe an update on what's going on with the

The couple of issues that are going before Circuit Court, has there been a date set for these or no?

So no.

Seeing Mr. Herrick shake his head no.

OK.

It's going to take a while.

Doing everything we can do to try and get you out of your chair, but you don't need to come.

Any other new business?

I'll make that motion to adjourn the meeting of January 9th, 2024.

All right, motion to adjourn.

Carries.